Each death and departure comes to us as a surprise, a sorrow never anticipated. Life is a long series of farewells; only the circumstances should surprise us.

If you train people properly, they won't be able to tell a drill from the real thing. If anything, the real thing will be easier.

Knowledge of what you love somehow comes to you; you don’t have to read nor analyze nor study. If you love a thing enough, knowledge of it seeps into you, with particulars more real than any chart can furnish.

I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.

It is the loving, not the loved, woman who feels loveable.

It is not easy to be solitary unless you are also born ruthless. Every solitary repudiates someone.

In my time and neighborhood (and in my soul) there was only one standard by which a woman measured success: did some man want her?