Literary Birthday – 9 January – Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was born 9 January 1908, and died 14 April 1986.

Simone de Beauvoir: Nine 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.