I would certainly like to see some young women take up psychoanalysis seriously and reconstruct it from an absolutely new viewpoint.

The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet.

When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.

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.

A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.

I am not at all for a feminism which is entirely separatist, which would say, "this domain is purely for women." I don't believe that at all.

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.