"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion."

"Taking without being taken in the anguish of becoming prey is the dangerous game of adolescent feminine sexuality."

"All those minds that are interested in finding out the truth communicate with each other across the distances of space and time. I, too, was taking part in the effort which humanity makes to know."

"There were no scruples, no feelings of respect or loyal affection that would stop us from making up our minds by the pure light of reason - and of our own desires."

"Vengeance is pointless, but certain men do not have a place in the world we sought to construct."

"The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women."

"One is not born a woman, but becomes one."

"Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying."

"Jaques was only what he was; but from a distance he became something more, became everything to me, everything I did not possess. It was to him I owed pains and pleasures whose violence alone saved me from the deserts of boredom in which I found myself bogged down."

"Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient."

"The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels."

"The little girl feels that her body is escaping her, that it is no longer the clear expression of her individuality: it becomes foreign to her; and at the same moment she is grasped by others as a thing: on the street, eyes follow her, her body is subject to comments; she would like to become invisible; she is afraid of becoming flesh and afraid to show her flesh."

"The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her."

"If I were to share Jaques' existence I would find it hard to hold my own against him, for already I found his nihilism contagious."

"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."

"The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present."

"One is not born a genius one becomes a genius."

"Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to."

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

"Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive."

"Symbolism did not fall out of heaven or rise out of subterranean depths: it was elaborated like language, by the human reality."

"To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God's absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, & his victories as well."

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

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

"She gives birth in pain, she heals males' wounds, she nurses the newborn and buries the dead; of man she knows all that offends his pride and humiliates his will. While inclining before him and submitting flesh to spirit, she remains on the carnal borders of the spirit; and she contests the sharpness of hard masculine architecture by softening the angles; she introduces free luxury and unforeseen grace."

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

"The fear of death never left me; I couldn't get used to the thought; I would still sometimes shake and weep with terror. By contrast, the fact of existence here and now sometimes took on a glorious splendour."

"One night I summoned God, if He really existed, to show Himself to me. He didn't, and I never addressed another word to Him. In my heart of hearts I was very glad He didn't exist. I should have hated it if what was going on here below had had to end up in eternity."

"Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies."

"It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time."

"There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future."

"When an individual is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he does become inferior."

"At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice does not pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer."

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

"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."

"It is dreadful to think that behind me my own past is no longer anything but shifting darkness."

"All she had to do was make the simplest of gestures - open her hands and let go her hold. She lifted one hand and moved the fingers of it; they responded, in surprise and obedience, and this obedience of a thousand little unsuspected muscles was in itself a miracle. Why ask for more?"

"Live with no time out."

"Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority."

"Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken."

"But this element of failure is a very condition of his life; one can never dream of eliminating it without immediately dreaming of death. This does not mean that one should consent to failure, but rather one must consent to struggle against it without respite."

"I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat."

"Suddenly I was struck motionless: I was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was the heroine; she was still almost a child, but we, too, were growing up."

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

"A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison."

"If you haven't been happy very young you can still be happy later on but it's much harder. You need more luck."

"Trudging alone along that black road, sometimes in the teeth of wind and rain, and watching the white distant gleam of convolvulus through the park railings, gave me an exhilarating sensation of adventure."

"But I was brought up on convent morals and paternal nationalism, I was getting bogged down in contradictions."

"Buying is a profound pleasure."

"The relation of woman to husband, of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage."