Dwelling-place and food are useful for life but give it no significance: the immediate goals of the housekeeper are only means, not true ends.

The state of emotional intoxication allows one to grasp existence in one's self and in the other, as both subjectivity and passivity. The two partners merge in this ambiguous unity; each one is freed of his own presence and achieves immediate communication with the other.

Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.

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.

Retirement revives the sorrow of parting, the feeling of abandonment, solitude and uselessness that is caused by the loss of some beloved person.

What is an adult? A child blown up by age.

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.