697 Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

For years I thought my work still lay ahead, and now I find it is behind me: there was no moment when it took place.

I don't want to be just another blade of grass.

To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.

To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system.

It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.

Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it.

Anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.

A writer is hoisted up onto a pedestal only to scrutinize him more closely and conclude that it was a mistake to put him up there in the first place.

I'm not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I'm against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children.