Life's too short to care about what other people think. Besides, they should accept us for who we are

No one expected you to amount to much," she told me. "Lori was the smart one, Maureen the pretty one, and Brian the brave one. You never had much going for you except that you always worked hard.

I became known as Lily Casey, the mustang-breaking, poker-playing, horse-race-winning schoolmarm of Coconino County, and it wasn't half bad to be in place where no one had a problem with a woman having a moniker like that.

In this world, it's not enough to have a fine education. You need a piece of paper to prove you got it.

The dangerous falls were the ones that happened so fast you didn't have time to react

Confidence doesn't come from thinking you're perfect or flawless. That's arrogance. Confidence comes from appreciating the beauty of your texture.

As I sat down, though, I realized that you can get used to certain luxuries that you start to think they're necessities, but when you have to forgo them, you come to see that you don't need them after all. There was a big difference between needing things and wanting things--though a lot of people had trouble telling the two apart--and at the ranch, I could see, we have pretty much everything we'd need but precious little else.