D. Simone Quotes

I'm a nut for Bach as a composer.

I can read and arrange, but I can't write.

I love to travel to hear different kinds of music.

I can't stand loud guitars that make me deaf.

By the time I was eight I was taking classical piano lessons and I wanted to be a concert pianist. But that didn't work out. I graduated from high school and my formal education ended.

Prayer is like money - it has no smell.

When we are young we believe to be adults; when we are adults we believe to be young.

I don't want to be just another blade of grass.

Marriage is traditionally the destiny offered to women by society. Most women are married or have been, or plan to be or suffer from not being.

One is not conceived a lady, one turns into one.

A Darwinian nation of economic fitness abhors idleness, dependence, non-productivity.

Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness.

To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.

Ah, if only there were two of me, she thought, one who spoke and the other who listened, one who lived and one who watched, how I would love myself! I would envy no one.

I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there´s the true, preestablished balance.

Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.

Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death.

there is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.

Tragedies are all right for a while: you are concerned, you are curious, you feel good. And then it gets repetitive, it doesn't advance, it grows dreadfully boring: it is so very boring, even for me.

Writing is a trade ... which is learned by writing.

Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death.

The body is the instrument of our hold on the world.

Feminism is one way of attacking society as it now exists.

To create a language all of a piece which would be a women's language, that I find quite insane. There does not exist a mathematics which is only a women's mathematics, or a feminine science.

Habit has a kind of poetry.

Buying is profound pleasure.

it is not the inferiority of women that has caused their historical insignificance; it is rather their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority.

When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.

You can't assume the responsibility for everything you do or don't do.

it is so difficult not to become vain about one's own good luck.

It is impossible to do anything for anyone.

The writer can't stop her unconscious from showing up, that's certain.

If the unconscious must express itself it will do so through the work that you do consciously or subconsciously, with words, with what you have to say.

That a whole part of the middle class detests me... is utterly normal. I would be troubled if the contrary were true.

There was a time, in the nineteenth century, for example, when women spoke mostly about the house, children, birth, and so forth, because it was their domain. That's changing a little, now.

The individuals who seem to us most outstanding, who are honored with the name of genius, are those who have proposed to enact the fate of all humanity in their personal existences.

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

The Communists, following Hegel, speak of humanity and its future as of some monolithic individuality. I was attacking this illusion.

What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.

Choice springs from the totality of the person. Thus, to study, to analyze what a person is, does not eliminate the idea of freedom.

You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.

Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind.

A man of the right doesn't write in the same way as a man of the left, you can see that right away, or a woman of the right or a woman of the left.

It's so easy to be mistaken about the future. Sometimes there are avant-gardes which believe themselves to be the avant-garde and which later find themselves to be absolutely dated.

I think there is a great tendency toward autobiography among women today. It is perhaps facile - and I say that even though I have written one myself.

There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.

I am not at all for a feminism which is entirely separatist, which would say, "this domain is purely for women." I don't believe that at all.

A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.

To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system.