Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.

A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life

Only longing can fill with more of itself.

Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve under two masters simultaneously.

Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?--startling, unexpected, unknown?

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.

For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, "This is what I have made of it! This!" And what had she made of it? What, indeed?