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Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, I don't want to be just another blade of grass.

Simone de Beauvoir

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Simone de Beauvoir
Age: 78 †
Born: 1908
Born: January 9
Died: 1986
Died: April 14
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Political Activist
Political Philosopher
Paris
France
Simone-Lucie-Ernestine-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Castor
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Littles
Casts
Blades
Little
Thousands
Insects
World
Grass
Forest
Scurrying
Green
Alike
Anguished
Equal
Shade
Lawn
Huge
Hiding
Monotonous
Another
Forests
Lawns
Thought
Cast
Blade

More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

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Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.
Simone de Beauvoir
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As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.
Simone de Beauvoir
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In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.
Simone de Beauvoir
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To be feminist doesn't mean simply to do nothing, to reduce yourself to total impotence under the pretext of refusing masculine values. There is a problematic, a very difficult dialectic between accepting power and refusing it, accepting certain masculine values, and wanting to transform them. I think it's worth a try.
Simone de Beauvoir
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However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because of the surrounding circumstances, these talents will be still-born.
Simone de Beauvoir
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You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes.
Simone de Beauvoir
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What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.
Simone de Beauvoir
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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.
Simone de Beauvoir
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The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams.
Simone de Beauvoir
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It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problems with a mind free from bias.
Simone de Beauvoir
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There was a time, in the nineteenth century, for example, when women spoke mostly about the house, children, birth, and so forth, because it was their domain. That's changing a little, now.
Simone de Beauvoir
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It's not a very big step from contentment to complacency.
Simone de Beauvoir
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It is not mere chance that makes families speak of a child who is 'extraordinary for his age' and also of an old man who is 'extraordinary for his age' the extraordinariness lies in their behaving like human beings when they are either not yet or no longer men.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.
Simone de Beauvoir
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Whatever the country, capitalist or socialist, man was everywhere crushed by technology, made a stranger to his own work, imprisoned, forced into stupidity.
Simone de Beauvoir
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A man is in the right in being a man it is the woman who is in the wrong.
Simone de Beauvoir
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It's important that you think of your relationship with the world and the way you can express that world and that you not be stopped if it scandalizes or embarrasses but you must not look for scandal or for the avant-garde as a thing in itself.
Simone de Beauvoir
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I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.
Simone de Beauvoir