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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.

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
Window
Corpses
Inside
Chill
Happened
Hanging
Read
Account
Heart
Immediately
Chills
Bars
Corpse
Suicide
Frail
Accounts
Spine

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At the moment of their emancipation, women have a need to write their own histories.
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If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
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To abstain from politics is in itself a political attitude.
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She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.
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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 emancipation of women must be the work of women themselves, independent of the class struggle.
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If women really did have complete equality with men, society would be completely overturned.
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It must be said in addition that the men with the most scrupulous respect for embryonic life are also those who are most zealous when it comes to condemning adults to death in war.
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Jealousy is not contemptible, real love has a beak and claws.
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She was trying to get rid of a religious hangover.
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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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That a whole part of the middle class detests me... is utterly normal. I would be troubled if the contrary were true.
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My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.
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The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman's concrete situation.
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I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.
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Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
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From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.
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The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.
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All the opportunities you let slip by! The idea, the inspiration just doesn´t come fast enough. Instead of being open, you´re closed up tight. That´s the worst sin of all - the sin of omission.
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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.
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