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.

there is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.

The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.

A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?

In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.

A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.