To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.

Marriage is traditionally the destiny offered to women by society. Most women are married or have been, or plan to be or suffer from not being.

If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde.

To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

it is so difficult not to become vain about one's own good luck.

Words have to murder reality before they can hold it captive.