Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female - whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.

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.

... to adapt one's outlook to another person's salvation is the surest and quickest way of losing him.

To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.

There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.

Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.