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

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.

One can not start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance.

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.

Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it.

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.

To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.