there is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.

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

A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.

They [Americans] want to believe that Good and Evil can be defined in precise categories, that Good is already, or will be easily achieved. ... if this optimism appears too superficial, they will try to create a kind of anti-God: the U.S.S.R. That is Evil, and it only needs to be annihilated to re-establish the reign of Good.

Can one say that there is a way of crying out, of speaking, which is properly feminine? Personally, I don't think so. In the end, I find this is another way of putting women in a kind of singularity, a ghetto, which is not what I want. I want them to be singular and universal at the same time.

It's only arrogance if you're wrong.

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.