Society, being codified by man, decrees that woman is inferior; she can do away with this inferiority only by destroying the male's superiority.

Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death.

There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future.

Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity. The evil all arose from the fact that he had increased his needs rather than limited them; . . . As long as fresh needs continued to be created, so new frustrations would come into being. When had the decline begun? The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty. . . . Only a moral revolution - not a social or political revolution - only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.

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

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

Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one that you met when you were nineteen.