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.

Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death.

The nearer I come to the end of my days, the more I am enabled to see that strange thing, a life, and to see it whole.

It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age'; the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men.

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

On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.

If the feminine issue is so absurd, is because the male's arrogance made it "a discussion