The Woman Destroyed (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

by Simone de Beauvoir

Sadness can be wept away. But the impatience of delight—it is not so easy to get rid of that.

And how delightful to live with no imperatives, no kind of restraint!

When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values, and it is impossible for me to examine this conviction with an objective eye.

‘That’s the great thing about writing,’ I said. ‘Pictures lose their shape; their colours fade. But words you carry away with you.’

Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion of them that the daughters have to conform to. Mothers accept them as they are.