697 Quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Literature took the place in my life that had once been occupied by religion: it absorbed me entirely, and transfigured my life.

One has no right to make up one’s mind about the future in advance.

I was still keenly aware as in my childhood of the inexplicable nature of my presence here on earth; where had I come from here; where was I going? I often thought about these things with a kind of stupefied horror and used to fill my diary with long self-communings.

I haven’t abandoned you, my little ally, my heart. I kiss you with all my soul.

But it is impossible for anyone to say ‘I am sacrificing myself’ without feeling bitterness.

It’s easy to pay with the blood of others.

It was a lovely autumn day with a blue sky: I made my way through a lead-coloured world, and I realized that my mother’s accident was affecting me far more than I had thought it would. I could not really see why. It had wrenched her out of the framework, the role, the set of images in which I had imprisoned her: I recognized her in this patient in bed, but I did not recognize either the pity or the kind of disturbance that she aroused in me.

She asked us to raise the curtain that was covering the window and she looked at the golden leaves of the trees. ‘How lovely. I shouldn’t see that from my flat!’ She smiled. And both of us, my sister and I, had the same thought: it was that same smile that had dazzled us when we were little children, the radiant smile of a young woman. Where had it been between then and now?

I had to call the past to life, and illuminate every corner of the five continents, descend to the centre of the earth and make the circuit of the moon and stars.