For there is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary.

Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it.

There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.

One is a writer, or one is not.

The dictionary is, however, only a rough draft.

They say that oppression engenders hate. They are heard on all sides crying hate hate.

men are not born with a faculty for the universal and ... women are not reduced at birth to the particular. The universal has been, and is continually, at every moment, appropriated by men. It does not happen by magic, it must be done. It is an act, a criminal act, perpetrated by one class against another. It is an act carried out at the level of concepts, philosophy, politics.