Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.

…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.

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.

Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.

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.

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

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

To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.

...her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly.

What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping beauty?

If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion