Scriassine studied me in turn. “You’re not so dumb, you know. Generally I dislike intelligent women, maybe because they’re not intelligent enough. They always want to prove to themselves, and to everyone else, how terribly smart they are. So all they do is talk and never understand anything. What struck me the first time I saw you was that way you have of keeping quiet.
Between women love is contemplation; caresses are meant less to appropriate the other than to recreate oneself slowly through her; separation is eliminated, there is neither fight nor victory nor defeat; each one is both subject and object.
But I know my only defense is to answer, “I think it because it is true,” thereby eliminating my subjectivity;.
The present is a transitory existence which is made in order to be abolished: it retrieves itself only by transcending itself toward the permanence of future being; it is only as an instrument, as a means, it is only by it’s efficacy with regard to the coming of the future that the present is validly realized: reduced to itself it is nothing, one may dispose of it as he pleases.
Men’s economic privilege, their social value, the prestige of marriage, the usefulness of masculine support – all these encourage women to ardently want to please men. They are on the whole still in a state of serfdom. It follows that woman knows and chooses herself not as she exists for herself but as man defines her. She thus has to be described first as men dream of her since her being-for-men is one of the essential factors of her concrete condition.
One is not born a woman, one becomes one.
By her eyes she clung to the world, as by her nails she clung to the sheet, so that she might not be engulfed. ‘Live! Live!
One understands now the drama that rends the adolescent girl at puberty: she cannot become “a grown-up” without accepting her femininity.
There is no such thing as maternal “instinct”: the word does not in any case apply to the human species. The mother’s attitude is defined by her total situation and by the way she accepts it.
For the first time I saw her as a dead body under suspended sentence.
To identify Woman with Altruism is to guarantee man absolute rights to her devotion; it is to impose on women a categorical must-be.
But what does the word insist mean after a whole life of love and understanding? I have never asked anything for myself that I did not also wish for him.
If she could inherit, she would thus wrongly transmit her paternal family’s riches to that of her husband: she is carefully excluded from the succession.
When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values, and it is impossible for me to examine this conviction with an objective eye.
I had to call the past to life, and illuminate every corner of the five continents, descend to the centre of the earth and make the circuit of the moon and stars.
Simonides of Amorgos says, “Women are the greatest evil God ever created: if they sometimes seem useful, they soon change into trouble for their masters.” For Hipponax: “There are but two days in life when your wife brings you joy: her wedding day and her funeral.
The prostitute is the sum of all types of feminine slavery at once.
The facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced.
All around me the world lies like an immense hypothesis that I no longer verify.
The passionate man seeks possession; he seeks to attain being. The failure and the hell which he creates for himself have been described often enough. He causes certain rare treasures to appear in the world, but he also.