Simone de Beauvoir

"What is an adult? A child puffed with age."

"The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion."

"His personal prestige, his qualities, his competence assure him a preponderant role however; since 1927 he has been above all the unchallenged specialist on peasant question. But the power he exercises is no more dictatorial than, for example, Roosevelts was. New Chinas Constitution renders impossible the concentration of authority in one mans hands; the country is governed by a team whose members have been united through a long common struggle and by a close friendship."

"I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom."

"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth — and truth rewarded me."

"Il ny a pas de mort naturelle: rien de ce qui arrive à lhomme nest jamais naturel puisque sa présence met le monde en question. Tous les hommes sont mortels: mais pour chaque homme sa mort est un accident et, même sil la connaît et y consent, une violence indue."

"But presently I began to bubble with happiness. No, my daughters absence did not sadden me at all—quite the reverse. I could drive as fast or as slowly as I liked, go where I liked, stop when the whim took me. I made up my mind to spend the week wandering about. I get up as soon as it is light. The car is waiting for me in the street or in the courtyard like a faithful animal; it is wet with dew; I wipe its eyes, and full of delight I tear away through the growing sunlight."

"Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I dont want to be just another blade of grass.""

"He had not applauded, he had remained seated, but he had looked at her steadily. From the depths of eternity he had looked at her and Rosalind became immortal. If I could believe him, she thought, if only I could believe him!"

"We were two of a kind, and our relationship would endure as long as we did: but it could not make up entirely for the fleeting riches to be had from encounters with different people."

"If I had amnesia, Id be almost like other men. Perhaps Id even be able to love you."

"Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it. Psychiatrists have told me that they give The Second Sex to their women patients to read, and not merely to intellectual women but to lower-middle-class women, to office workers and women working in factories. Your book was a great help to me. Your book saved me, are the words I have read in letters from women of all ages and all walks of life. If my book has helped women, it is because it expressed them, and they in their turn gave it its truth. Thanks to them, it is no longer a matter for scandal and concern. During these last ten years the myths that men created have crumbled, and many women writers have gone beyond me and have been far more daring than I. Too many of them for my taste take sexuality as their only theme; but at least when they write about it they now present themselves as the eye-that-looks, as subject, consciousness, freedom."