I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfishโฆ You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.
Simone de BeauvoirRetirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person.
Simone de BeauvoirThere is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.
Simone de BeauvoirMan is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word. Machines won't change human nature.
Simone de BeauvoirI consider it almost antifeminist to say that there is a feminine nature which expresses itself differently, that a woman speaks her body more than a man, because after all, men also speak their bodies when they write. Everything is implicated in the work of a writer.
Simone de BeauvoirThe 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.
Simone de Beauvoir