"...the practico-inert puts up with arbitrary demands: a friendship is not only a matter of day-by-day existence; it also falls into the past and becomes a set reality that we are compelled to accept...." (22)

"...when I lost myself in the object upon which I gazed, or in moments of physical or emotional ecstasy, or in the delight of memory, or in the heart-raising anticipation of what was to come, it seemed to me that I brought about the impossible junction between the in-itself and the for-itself. And I also wanted to realize myself in books that, like those I had loved, would be existing objects for others, but objects haunted by a presence-- my presence." (29)

"To begin with I was amorphous, but I was not manifold. On the contrary, what strikes me is the way the little girl of three lived on, grown calmer, in the child of ten, that child in the young woman of twenty, and so forward." (29)

"One of the meanings of paranoia is a refusal to abandon the subjective position: we are all more or less affected by it; we are all more or less blind to our inert presence in the Other's world. Yet from time to time some incident destroys my pullucid familiarity with myself. Friends point out words I have uttered or things I have done without noticing it; I said or did them without the least suspicion of having done so, and this realization disturbs me." (37-38)

"Every historical period is an absolute entity, one that cannot be compared with others by any universal criterion. THe varying destinies of mankind do not challenge one another. The future's wealth does not impoverish me." (39)

"No work that has reference to the world can be a mere transcription, since the world has not the power of speech. Facts do not determine their own expression; they dictate nothing. The person who recounts them finds out what he has to say about them through the art of saying it. If he produces no more than commonplace, conventional observations, then he is outside the scope of literature, but if on the other hand his living voice is heard, then he is within it." (115)

"In all cases, if the work is successfully accomplished it is defined as a unique universal in the imaginary mode. By means of this work the authors provides himself with a fictitious constitution: Sartre is referring to this operation when he states that every writer is inhabited by a 'vampire.' The I that speaks stands at a distance from the I that has been experienced, just as each sentence stands at a distance from the experience out of which it arises." (115)

"Bourgeois culture is a promise: it is a promise of a world that makes sense; a world whose good things may be enjoyed with a clear conscience; a world that guarantees sure and certain values forming an essential part of our lives and giving them the magnificence of an Idea. It was by no means easy to tear myself away from such splendid expectations." (117)

"The human being, stripped of pretensions and reduced to its simple truth, has something comic, ludicrous and touching about it, and at times something mysterious, as we see in Senecio: the name calls to mind both old age and the flower of the coltsfoot (senecio) and the picture shows us a lunar, childish face.
"The title makes one think: for although there is nothing literary about Klee's painting, words have great importance in it-- he brings printed and written letters into his pictures and he chooses his titles with great care, so that they form part of the painting and modify its meaning. It is these interchanges between the written language and that of painting, between the various earthly creatures, and between nature and architecture that give Klee's world its poetry. His process is the opposite of Picasso's, for Picasso's painting breaks reality down and analyses it. Klee sees it as a universal presence that beyond its apparent limits: everything is bound to the cosmos as a whole, and it is the painter's task to make this connection visible by isolating the analogies that exist between all things." (205-206)

"A person is shown as clearly by what he does not grasp as by what he does; sometimes even more so. Both Louis XVI and the last Tsar, by writing in effect 'Today, nothing' in their private diaries when revolution was breaking out all round them, tell us more about themselves than by any of their words or deeds." (23)

"One shatters the rational world by blind violence: for want of a solution, it is a radical means of escape." (31)

"[Klee's] is above all the vision of a world in gestation, begotten by the vectors, arrows and vortices. 'Adventures of the line,' as Michaus rightly put it." (205)

"A journey is also a personal adventure, a change in my relationship with the world, with space and time. It often begins in bewilderment: the novelty of the place and the people make me lose my head and I am filled with a desire to do a great many things and to do them all at once." (213)

Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done