Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.

Can one say that there is a way of crying out, of speaking, which is properly feminine? Personally, I don't think so. In the end, I find this is another way of putting women in a kind of singularity, a ghetto, which is not what I want. I want them to be singular and universal at the same time.

You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do or don't do.

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

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

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.

Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody.