from one minute to the next the present is merely an honorary past. It must be filled unceasingly anew to dissemble the curse it carries within itself; that is why Americans like speed, alcohol, thriller films and any sensational news: the demand for new things, and ever newer things, is feverish since nowhere will they rest.
Simone de BeauvoirRepresentation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.
Simone de BeauvoirBetween women love is contemplative; caresses are intended less to gain possession of the other than gradually to re-create the self through her; separateness is abolished, there is no struggle, no victory, no defeat; in exact reciprocity each is at once subject and object, sovereign and slave; duality become mutuality.
Simone de BeauvoirThe 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.
Simone de BeauvoirFeminism is a revolutionary movement which is different from the class struggle movement, the proletarian movement, but which is a movement which must be leftist. By that I mean at the extreme left, a movement working to overthrow the whole society.
Simone de BeauvoirIn 1949, I believed that social progress, the triumph of the proletariat, socialism would lead to the emancipation of women. But I saw that nothing came of it: first of all, that socialism was not achieved anywhere, and that in certain countries which called themselves socialist, the situation of women was no better than it was in so-called capitalist countries.
Simone de Beauvoir