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

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.

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 unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.

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.

Women aren't more easily swayed by fascism than men, but I believe that their situation makes them in effect more slavish than men.

Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.

Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me