Ashley

“Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age

“Surviving one’s own life, living on the other side of it like a spectator, is quite comfortable after all. You no longer expect anything, no longer fear anything, and every hour is like a memory.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

“Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself & in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying, & human existence is indistinguishable from an absurd vegetation; a life justifies itself only if its effort to perpetuate itself is integrated into its surpassing & if this surpassing has no other limits than those which the subject assigns himself.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death