Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Literature
Norms
Within
Norm
Write
Dominant
Seems
Writers
Writing
Tried
Even
Seem
People
Example
Proletarian
Class
Troubling

More quotes by Simone de Beauvoir

Image
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
That a whole part of the middle class detests me... is utterly normal. I would be troubled if the contrary were true.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
I think that Freud understood absolutely nothing about women - as he himself said.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
Ce n'est gue' re que dans les asiles que les coquettes gardent avec ente tement une foi entie' re en des regards absents normalement, elles re clament des te moins. Women fond of dress are hardly ever entirely satisfied not to be seen, except among the insane usually they want witnesses.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise. (p. 248)
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
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
Image
Therefore the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know it's exigencies.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
At bottom, antipsychiatry is still psychiatry. And it doesn't really address itself to women's problems.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
The role of a retired person is no longer to possess one.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
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.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
The Sahara was a spectacle as alive as the sea. The tints of the dunes changed according to the time of day and the angle of the light: golden as apricots from far off, when we drove close to them they turned to freshly made butter behind us they grew pink from sand to rock, the materials of which the desert was made varied as much as its tints.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word useful an absolute meaning nothing is useful if it is not useful to man nothing is useful to man if the latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free.
Simone de Beauvoir
Image
The earthly meaning of eternal life was death, and she refused to die.
Simone de Beauvoir