Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.

Harmony between two individuals is never granted-it has to be conquered indefinitely.

Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.

The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.

We always come back to the same vicious circle - an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it.

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?

At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories.