it is so difficult not to become vain about one's own good luck.

The time that one gains cannot be accumulated in a storehouse; it is contradictory to want to save up existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent and there is a good case for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make men of today happier than those of former times.

If her functioning as a female is not enough to define woman, if we decline also to explain her through "the eternal feminine," and if nevertheless we admit, provisionally, that women do exist, then we must face the question: what is a woman?

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.

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.

Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind.

Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.