When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].

This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.

The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.

The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project

Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman.