Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.

I could see no reason for being sad. It s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy.

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.

Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody.

Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.

The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.

Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.

Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else.

The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them.

‎A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.

To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.

People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls.

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.

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.

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.

…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.

...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.

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.

To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.

What is an adult? A child blown up by age.

You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes.

All success cloaks a surrender

But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves.

I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.

The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

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

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity no to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

Weakness' is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.

She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life.

I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.

I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.

It is so tiring to hate someone you love.

The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it.

To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.

The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.

A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.

That the child is the supreme aim of woman is a statement having precisely the value of an advertising slogan.

A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man.

There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.

He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!

Ready-made phrases and the ritual of etiquette were unknown to him; his thoughtfulness was pure improvisation, and it resembled the little inventions affection inspires.

Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.

Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.