“I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from The Blood of Others
“The sin of smiling whilst Louise was weeping, the sin of shedding my own tears and not hers. The sin of being another being.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from The Blood of Others
“Ik koos het bestaan niet, maar ik besta. Een ongerijmdheid die verantwoordelijk voor zichzelf is, dat ben ik.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from The Blood of Others
“They use the pretext of avoiding war, to make you swallow any kind of peace, said Paul. They use the pretext of a revolution to involve us in any kind of war, said Jardinet.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from The Blood of Others
“Ter a porta fechada, os lábios fechados: mas o meu silêncio proclama ordens."tu não dizes nada, e eu vou" ou "não dizes nada, e eu não vou". Toda a minha presença é palavra. Avança então, avança no lodo da noite. Decide. Eu decidi a tua morte e não estamos pagos. Mais ainda. Queria pedir misericórdia: não há misericórdia.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from The Blood of Others
“E pesando na terra todo o meu peso imóvel. Tu morres. Outros agonizam lentamente, corpos cheios de golpes, a pele colada aos ossos.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from The Blood of Others
“Não há salvação. Nem mesmo a embriagez do desespero e a resolução cega, porque tu estás aí, nessa cama, na luz selvagem da tua morte.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from The Blood of Others
“That’s what’s so wonderful about you, you’re so self-sufficient that I feel that you’ve created your own self.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from The Blood of Others
Simone de Beauvoir
Born place: in Paris, France
Born date January 9, 1908
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“Thus, there are times when a deep pragmatist should feel free to speak of rights—and not just legal rights but moral rights. These times, however, are rarer than we think. If we are truly interested in persuading our opponents with reason, then we should eschew the language of rights. This is, once again, because we have no non-question-begging (and non utilitarian) way of figuring out which rights really exist and which rights take precedence over others. But when it’s not worth arguing—either because the question has been settled or because our opponents can’t be reasoned with—then it’s time to stop arguing and rally the troops. It’s time to affirm our moral commitments, not with wonky estimates of probabilities but with words that stir our souls. But please do not take this as license to ignore everything else that I’ve said about “rights.” Most moral controversies are not simple cases of one tribe’s dominating another. In nearly all moral controversies, there are truly moral considerations on both sides.* There is something to be said for individualist systems that encourage people to take care of themselves. And there is something to be said for collective systems in which everyone gets the help they need. There is something to be said for not killing any human fetuses, and there is something to be said for letting people make their own tough bioethical choices. Here the solution is not for us to bludgeon one another with heartfelt assertions about rights, however tempting this may be. The solution is, once again, to put our automatic settings aside and shift into manual mode, seeking bargains brokered with the common currency.”
― Joshua D. Greene, quote from Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them
“Neuroscientists have discovered that when you ask the brain to meditate, it gets better not just at meditating, but at a wide range of self-control skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, and self-awareness.”
― Kelly McGonigal, quote from The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It
“I remembered during puberty, through the anorexic mists of intermittent menstrual cycles, that man, my father, lifting Shirley's nightdress over her head and asking her in his mocking way to choose what colour condom she wanted. 'Red or yellow?' Which did she choose? I can't remember. Perhaps she alternated. Perhaps there were other colours. It didn't happen once. It happened again and again. I had no power to stop it. That man, my father, had some control over me. I was drugged by the black silence in that big house, the vile whiff of aftershave, the crushing torment of inevitability. My father fucked Shirley using red or yellow condoms and it was those condoms that brought it all to an end. It was my last realization of the day; any more would have been too much to contemplate.
That time when my mother had found used condoms in bedroom, he had admitted, after a pointless burst my father's of denial, that he had been going to prostitutes. That was no doubt true but I can't imagine clients take used condoms away with them; prostitutes would surely get rid of the things. No. My father kept those used condoms as a prize. He was fucking his fourteen-year-old-daughter. He was proud of it.
Rebecca welled up with tears. Poor thing, she kept saying. Poor thing.”
― quote from Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
“I should have found you detestable.—Forgive that supposition.—By living with you on terms of close intimacy, I should have occasion, I doubt not, to see you in a cotton night-cap or in some absurd or grotesque domestic situation.—You”
― Théophile Gautier, quote from Mademoiselle de Maupin
“I did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him... The land of tears is so mysterious.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quote from Der kleine Prinz
After We Fell
Monster
American Savages
Chariots of The Gods
Small Steps
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