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and on succeeding some months later to the title, had set himself to the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing.
Oscar Wilde • The Picture of Dorian Gray
The male’s vocation is action; he needs to produce, fight, create, progress, go beyond himself toward the totality of the universe and the infinity of the future; but traditional marriage does not invite woman to transcend herself with him; it confines her in immanence.
Simone De Beauvoir • The Second Sex
She regrets closing the doors of her home behind herself; as a young girl, the whole world was her kingdom; the forests belonged to her. Now she is confined to a restricted space; Nature is reduced to the size of a geranium pot; walls block out the horizon.
Simone De Beauvoir • The Second Sex
But the wife is not called to build a better world; the house, the bedroom, the dirty laundry, the wooden floors, are fixed things: she can do no more than rout out indefinitely the foul causes that creep in; she attacks the dust, stains, mud, and filth; she fights sin, she fights with Satan. But it is a sad destiny to have to repel an enemy
... See moreSimone De Beauvoir • The Second Sex
I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.
Richard Dawkins • The God Delusion
seeing clearly is not her business: she was taught to accept masculine authority; she thus forgoes criticizing, examining, and judging for herself.
Simone De Beauvoir • The Second Sex
but he recognized that each family functioned with its own impenetrable logic, so he resisted the urge to say anything.
Coco Mellors • Cleopatra and Frankenstein
One of the many hypotheses coagulating in these early days of time-travel was that language informed experience—that we did not simply describe but create our world through language, like Adam in the Garden of Eden calling a spade a spade or whatever happens in Genesis.