It was a lovely autumn day with a blue sky: I made my way through a lead-coloured world, and I realized that my mother’s accident was affecting me fa… - Simone de Beauvoir

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It was a lovely autumn day with a blue sky: I made my way through a lead-coloured world, and I realized that my mother’s accident was affecting me far more than I had thought it would. I could not really see why. It had wrenched her out of the framework, the role, the set of images in which I had imprisoned her: I recognized her in this patient in bed, but I did not recognize either the pity or the kind of disturbance that she aroused in me.