I walk beneath your pens, and am not what I truly am, but what you'd prefer to imagine me.

And what shall I tell you, lady, of the natural secrets I have discovered while cooking? And I often say, when observing these details: had Aristotle prepared victuals, he would have written more.

Who has forbidden women to engage in private and individual studies? Have they not a rational soul as men do?...I have this inclination to study and if it is evil I am not the one who formed me thus - I was born with it and with it I shall die.

I believed, when I entered this convent, I was escaping from myself, but alas, poor me, I brought myself with me!

... privation is the source of appetite.

Rare is he who will concede genius.

I was not yet three years old when my mother determined to send one of my elder sisters to learn to read at a school for girls we call the Amigas. Affection, and mischief, caused me to follow her, and when I observed how she was being taught her lessons I was so inflamed with the desire to know how to read, that deceiving - for so I knew it to be - the mistress, I told her that my mother had meant for me to have lessons too. ... I learned so quickly that before my mother knew of it I could already read.