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Why does one exist? That's not my problem. One does exist. The thing to do is to take no notice but go at it on the run and to keep on going right on until you die.

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
Doe
Problem
Take
Notice
Right
Exist
Thing
Existence
Going
Dies
Running
Keep

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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.
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Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.
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One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.
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Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess.
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all success cloaks a surrender
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In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider.
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I'm not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I'm against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children.
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She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else.
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Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized.
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Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death.
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At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories.
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Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.
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Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.
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I could see no reason for being sad. It´s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy.
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They [Americans] want to believe that Good and Evil can be defined in precise categories, that Good is already, or will be easily achieved. ... if this optimism appears too superficial, they will try to create a kind of anti-God: the U.S.S.R. That is Evil, and it only needs to be annihilated to re-establish the reign of Good.
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The individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and to other individuals he exists only by transcending himself, and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads outside of himself.
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When women act like women, they are accused of being inferior. When women act like human beings, they are accused of behaving like men.
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Virginia Woolf thought a lot about her own sex when she wrote. In the best sense of the word, her writing is very feminine, and by that I mean that women are supposed to be very sensitive to all the sensations of nature, much more so than men, much more contemplative. It's this quality that marks her best works.
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…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.
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Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind.
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