It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.

You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.

There are jobs that can be done equally well by men or by women and that finally you can't see a difference. But from the moment that you involve yourself fully in writing a novel, for example, or an essay, then you are involved as a woman, in the same way that you can't deny your nationality - you are French, you are a man, you are a woman... all this passes into the writing.

A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings.

She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.

As long as the family and the myth of the family ... have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed.

Ah, if only there were two of me, she thought, one who spoke and the other who listened, one who lived and one who watched, how I would love myself! I would envy no one.