A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

Like all people who have nothing, I lived on dreams.

Poor people who had escaped from poverty as I had, feared it, hated it and fled from it all their lives. Those born rich could afford to be touched by it.

The world is a wheel always turning.

I was so obsessed and consumed with my grievances that I could not get away from myself and think things out in the light. I was in the grip of that blinding, destructive, terrible thing -- righteous indignation.

Woe is me! Bitter is me! For what is my life? Why didn't the ship go under and drown me before I came to America?

I'm one of the millions of immigrant children, children of loneliness, wandering between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in.