Literary Birthday – 9 January – Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir was born 9 January 1908, and died 14 April 1986.
Simone de Beauvoir Quotes
- If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
- Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.
- I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.
- 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[…].
- (What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.)
- A day in which I don’t write leaves a taste of ashes.
- The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.
- I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.
- I was made for another planet altogether. I mistook the way.
Simone de Beauvoir was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne before becoming a schoolteacher, and an editor, with Jean-Paul Sartre, of Les Temps Modèrnes. Beauvoir wrote novels, essays, biographies, and autobiographies. She is best known for She Came to Stay, The Mandarins, and The Second Sex
. Her memoirs are Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter and The Prime of Life. She is one of the most important writers of the 20th century because of the literature she created and her legacy of social and political commitment. She received the 1954 Prix Goncourt, the 1975 Jerusalem Prize, and the 1978 Austrian State Prize for European Literature. She was also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961, 1969 and 1973.
Source for Image 刘东 鳌 (Liu Dong’ao), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Simone_de_Beauvoir_in_Beijing_1955.jpg
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