One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you’ve lost that, you’ve lost everything.
Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.
Tragedies are all right for a while: you are concerned, you are curious, you feel good. And then it gets repetitive, it doesn’t advance, it grows dreadfully boring: it is so very boring, even for me.
When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior.
It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life’s parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.
All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them.
Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male’s superiority.
Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.
The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.
He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time.
Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.
And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.
What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping beauty?
Women’s mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others.
She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.
The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.
In a way, literature is true than life,′ he said to himself. ‘On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that’s why it’s false. But it’s damned satisfying. In life, you’re constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.
It is so tiring to hate someone you love.