I never thought of myself as being in the avant-garde. I said what I had to say, as I was able to say it.

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.

To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.

Justice can never be done in the midst of injustice.

The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice.

Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other.

There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.' There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me.