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Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter QUOTES

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter QUOTES

1 " One night I summoned God, if He really existed, to show Himself to me. He didn't, and I never addressed another word to Him. In my heart of hearts I was very glad He didn't exist. I should have hated it if what was going on here below had had to end up in eternity. "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

2 " Alone: for the first time I understood the terrible significance of that word. Alone without a witness, without anyone to speak to, without refuge. The breath in my body, the blood in my veins, all this hurly-burly in my head existed for nobody. "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

3 " I was too much of an extremist to be able to live under the eye of God and at the same time say both yes and no to life "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

4 " It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator burdened with all the contradictions in the world. "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

5 " If I were to share Jaques' existence I would find it hard to hold my own against him, for already I found his nihilism contagious. "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

6 " Jaques was only what he was; but from a distance he became something more, became everything to me, everything I did not possess. It was to him I owed pains and pleasures whose violence alone saved me from the deserts of boredom in which I found myself bogged down. "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

7 " I didn't know the first thing about the people around me, but that didn't matter: I was in a new world; and I had the feelings that at last I had put my finger on the secret of freedom. "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

8 " The facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced. "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

9 " All those minds that are interested in finding out the truth communicate with each other across the distances of space and time. I, too, was taking part in the effort which humanity makes to know. "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

10 " I was convinced that I would be, that I was already, one in a million. "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

11 " Suddenly I was struck motionless: I was living through the first chapter of a novel in which I was the heroine; she was still almost a child, but we, too, were growing up. "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

12 " The fear of death never left me; I couldn't get used to the thought; I would still sometimes shake and weep with terror. By contrast, the fact of existence here and now sometimes took on a glorious splendour. "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

13 " I had to call the past to life, and illuminate every corner of the five continents, descend to the centre of the earth and make the circuit of the moon and stars "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

14 " Why shouldn't a mystical theology be possible? 'I want to touch God or become God,' I declared in my journal. All through that year I abandoned myself intermittently to these deliriums. "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

15 " At night I would climb the steps to the Sacre-Coeur, and I would watch Paris, that futile oasis, scintillating in the wilderness of space. I would weep, because it was so beautiful, and because it was so useless. "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

16 " Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody. "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

17 " …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. "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

18 " The books I liked became a Bible from which I drew advice and support; I copied out long passages from them; I memorized new canticles and new litanies, psalms, proverbs, and prophecies, and I sanctified every incident in my life by the recital of these sacred texts. My emotions, my tears, and my hopes were no less sincere on account of that; the words and the cadences, the lines and the verses were not aids to make believe: but they rescued from silent oblivion all those intimate adventures of the spirit that I couldn’t speak to anyone about; they created a kind of communion between myself and those twin souls which existed somewhere out of reach; instead of living out my small private existence, I was participating in a great spiritual epic. "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

19 " all success cloaks a surrender "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

20 " In fact, the sickness I was suffering from was that I had been driven out of the paradise of childhood and had not found my place in the world of adults. I had set myself up in the absolute in order to gaze down upon this world which was rejecting me; now, if I wanted to act, to write a book, to express myself, I would have to go back down there: but my contempt had annihilated it, and I could see nothing but emptiness. The fact is that I had not yet put my hand to the plow. Love, action, literary work: all I did was to roll these ideas round in my head; I was fighting in an abstract fashion against abstract possibilities, and I had come to the conclusion that reality was of the most pitiful insignificance. I was hoping to hold fast to something, and misled by the violence of this indefinite desire, I was confusing it with the desire for the infinite. "

― Simone de Beauvoir , Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter