On ne naît pas femme, on le devient .

She appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. . . . She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other.

Work would be terribly boring if one did not play the game all out, passionately.

Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself.

The women of today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth of femininity; they are beginning to affirm their independence in concrete ways; but they do not easily succeed in living completely the life of a human being.

Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity.

That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.

Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one you met when you were nineteen.

There was a group of Americans taking photographs. “What barbarians!’’ said Papa. “They take photographs so that they do not have to look.”

The innumerable conflicts that set fnen 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.