Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.

But women do not say 'We', except at some congress of feminists or similar formal demonstration; men say 'women', and women use the same word in referring to themselves.

He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time

When an individual (or a group of individuals) is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he is inferior.

In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid.

The innumerable conflicts that set men and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.

The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself.