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.
She compensated for this sense of inferiority by making fun of everything. I did not notice it then, but she never made fun of my faults, only of my virtues;.
I know nothing, nothing. I not only have no answer to give, but I haven’t even found a satisfactory way of propounding the questions.
My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute.
He draws the motivations of his moral attitude from within the character which he has given himself and from within the universe which is its correlative.
The means, it is said, will be justified by the end; but it is the means which define it, and if it is contradicted at the moment that it is set up, the whole enterprise sinks into absurdity.
Lynching is an absolute evil; it represents the survival of an obsolete civilization, the perpetuation of a struggle of races which has to disappear;.
I told myself that as long as there were books I could be sure of being happy.
We only exist if we act.
With regard to us, she often displayed a cruel unkindness that was more thoughtless than sadistic: her desire was not to cause us unhappiness but to prove her own power to herself.
It must be added that the men who most respect embryonic life are the same ones who do not hesitate to send adults to death in war.
Todas las mujeres se creen diferentes; todas piensan que ciertas cosas no pueden sucederles, y todas ellas se equivocan.
What stops them is that as soon as they give the word “end” its double meaning of goal and fulfillment they clearly perceive this ambiguity of their condition, which is the most fundamental of all: that every living movement is a sliding toward death. But if they are willing to look it in the face they also discover that every movement toward death is life.
The goal which my freedom aims at is conquering existence across the always inadequate density of being.
Love is then renunciation of all possession, of all confusion. One renounces being in order that there may be that being which one is not.
Everything that men have written about women should be viewed with suspicion, because they are both judge and party,’ wrote Poulain de la Barre,11 a little-known seventeenth-century feminist.
Time vanishes behind those who leave this world, and the older I get the more my past years draw together.
One can not, without absurdity, indefinitely sacrifice each generation to the following one; human history would then be only an endless succession of negations which would never return to the positive.
One has no right to make up one’s mind about the future in advance.
I haven’t abandoned you, my little ally, my heart. I kiss you with all my soul.
I’m not tragic these days, I don’t weep, but I feel alone, bewildered, far from you, far from everything – nothing has any meaning.