I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where i slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.

Beauvoir herself was deeply religious as a child —- at one point intending to become a nun -— until Simone de Beauvoir experienced a crisis of faith at age 14 after which Simone de Beauvoir remained an atheist for the rest of her life. Debates rage on about the extent to which they influenced each other in their existentialist works such as Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Beauvoir's She Came to Stay. Beauvoir used Les Temps Modernes to promote her own work and explore her ideas on a small scale before fashioning essays and books.

"La Beauvoir" redirects here; also see: Beauvoir (disambiguation). She is best known for her novels including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins as well as her 1949 treatise The Second Sex a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. Beauvoir wrote novels essays biographies an autobiography monographs on philosophy politics and social issues.