Simone de Beauvoir - Life Quotes

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Even the children of Carmona were divided into two camps, and below the ramparts, among the brushwood and rocks, we battled with stones shouting "Long live the duke!" and others, "Down with the tyrant!" We fought viciously, but I was never satisfied with this game — the fallen enemy rose again, the dead came back to life. The day after a battle, victors and vanquished both found themselves unharmed.

Simone de Beauvoir
Religion could do no more for my mother than the hope of posthumous success could do for me. Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.

Simone de Beauvoir
You made me come to Paris. You pestered me to start living again. Well, now it's up to you to make my life livable. You mustn't let three whole days go by without coming to see me. … You wanted me to take notice of you. Now nothing else matters to me. I know you're alive and I feel emptiness inside me when you're away.

Simone de Beauvoir
Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death.

Simone de Beauvoir
It was as though some stubborn god spent their time in an immutable and absurd balancing act between life and death, prosperity and poverty.

Simone de Beauvoir
I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

Simone de Beauvoir
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
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

Simone de Beauvoir
Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.

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

Simone de Beauvoir