How will the fact of being women have affected our lives? What precise opportunities have been given us, and which ones have been denied? What destiny awaits our younger sisters, and in which direction should we point them?
Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms...
I feel something troubling inside of me which scares me, an exhausting violence. But I accept the great adventure of being me.
By the time humankind reaches the stage of writing its mythology and laws, patriarchy is definitively established: it is males who write the codes.
Economically, men and women almost form two castes; all things being equal, the former have better jobs, higher wages, and greater chances to succeed than their new female competitors; they occupy many more places in industry, in politics, and so forth, and they hold the most important positions.
It is difficult for men to measure the enormous extent of social discrimination that seems insignificant form the outside and whose moral and intellectual repercussions are so deep in woman that they appear to spring from an original nature. The man most sympathetic to women never knows her concrete situation fully.
Doomed to procreation and secondary tasks, stripped of her practical importance and her mystical prestige, woman becomes no more than a servant.
Has my watch stopped? No. But its hands do not seem to be going around. Don’t look at them. Think of something else – anything else: think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in spite of the nervous tension of waiting.
Life has made me discover the world as it is, that is, a world of suffering and oppression, of undernourishment for the majority of people, things that I didn’t know when I was young and when I imagined that to discover the world was to discover something beautiful.
They use the pretext of avoiding war, to make you swallow any kind of peace, said Paul. They use the pretext of a revolution to involve us in any kind of war, said Jardinet.
But it is impossible for anyone to say ‘I am sacrificing myself’ without feeling bitterness.
God! when you think of all the things you could do and yet somehow never do! All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn’t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you’re closed up tight. Thats’s the worst sin of all – the sin of omission.
The world brings itself into being before my eyes in an everlasting present: I grow used to its different aspects so quickly that it does not seem to me to change.
The monologue is her form of revenge. FLAUBERT.
All those minds that are interested in finding out the truth communicate with each other across the distances of space and time. I, too, was taking part in the effort which humanity makes to know.
Have you ever felt in your inmost being, the conscience of others?′ again she was trembling, the words were not releasing her. ‘It’s intolerable you know.
It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me – they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the mannerisms. These pages were soaked through and through with my self – there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long.
The Koran treats women with the most absolute contempt.
I hadn’t known Chancel very well, but ten days earlier I had seen him laughing with the others around the Christmas tree. Maybe Robert was right; the distance between the living and the dead really isn’t very great. And yet, like myself, those future corpses who were drinking their coffee in silence appeared ashamed to be so alive.
This privilege, which he alone possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men. In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends.