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.

Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.

Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.

Each person has his or her own very particular history and after all, the unconscious is the most secret part of ourselves.

Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman.

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible.

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.