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

Françoise could not help taking a surreptitious glance at Xavière: she gave a start of amazement. Xavière was no longer watching, her head was lowered. Françoise barely suppressed a scream. The girl was pressing the lighted end against her skin, a bitter smile curling her lips. It was an intimate, solitary smile, like that of a half-wit; the voluptuous, tortured smile of a woman possessed of some secret pleasure.

The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them.

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

Feminism is one way of attacking society as it now exists.

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

The emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle.