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"In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality."
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"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
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"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."
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"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
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"And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book."
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"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
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"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."
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"Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind."
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"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
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"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
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"I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once-and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters."
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Explore more quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

"Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap."
Being

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

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

"Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself."
Truth

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

"Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized."
Success

"Buying is a profound pleasure."
Pleasure

"As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it."
Philosophy

"One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away."
Healing

"Let women be provided with living strength of their own."
Feminism
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