If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time
Interpretation
The quote highlights the unique way in which the speaker communicates, suggesting that each carefully crafted sentence carries weight and significance.
In this quote, Simone De Beauvoir describes the experience of receiving someone's thoughts as if they were gifts, emphasizing the care and deliberation with which they are expressed. The hesitance in forming sentences suggests a deep introspection, while the forcefulness of their delivery indicates a powerful emotional connection, making the act of communication feel intimate and valued.
In practice
In a speech about the power of communication in relationships, one might quote this to highlight thoughtful dialogue.
If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
Two separate beings, in different circumstances, face to face in freedom and seeking justification of their existence through one another, will always live an adventure full of risk and promise." (p. 248)
To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.
Sex pleasure in woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.
As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.
Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present β¦ Eating, sleeping, cleaning β the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.
I've come, even as a feminist, to dread the phrase 'female friendship,' because it tends to signal overdetermined relationships.
Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one we have dreamed into being. We love pople when their dream coincides with ours, the way two cutout designs laid one on top of the other might match. But dream worlds are not static like cutouts; sooner or later they change shape, leading to misunderstanding, loneliness and loss of love.
The most basic human desire is to feel like you belong. Fitting in is important.
I have to express sympathy from the bottom of my heart to those people who were taken as wartime comfort women. As a human being, I would like to express my sympathies, and also as prime minister of Japan I need to apologize to them.
I feel that women - without wishing to foster any strict separatist notions, homo or hetero - indeed have a need for their own publications and organizations. Our problems, our experiences as women are profoundly unique as compared to the other half of the human race.
If fear is the great enemy of intimacy, love is its true friend.
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