“you won’t ever get ahead if you keep feeling sorry for yourself. You must stop all the negative talk and start thinking positive. You have a lot of potential but your life won’t change until you change how you think”.”

“Boundaries are good, but without a gate, all that you have are fences.”

“Clear thinking at the wrong moment can stifle creativity.”

“The gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes bring you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.”

“We become so absorbed in our flaws and faults that we forget that it is better to be a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without. To have flaws is beauty in itself, a fact so frightening that we hurry to hide them from sight and tarnish the whole in the process of comparing ourselves to others.”

“A woman should be highly qualified and intelligent. Well, Most of the girls own a husband at the earlier age of their life and take care of husbands and house.”

“…and you drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, ‘That was fine’. And your life is a long line of fine.”

“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.”

“Three things you cannot recover in life: the WORD after it’s said, the MOMENT after it’s missed and the TIME after it’s gone. Now you know.”

“We are not our own light.”

“We must be true ambassadors of Christ on the earth in order to be able to put an end to the plague of ignorance in our society.”

“You nightmare, gasped and jerk up all at once where I bolt too, hand flown to rest on his kidneys. Confused bedclothes, the sulphurous dark. Worse for you, the same war, another battle so undoing that in daylight you won’t admit it, nothing, nothing, avert and work. His purple-circled eyes could have been anywhere. She sets a pan, quietly, of biscuits. Bring me morning’s water bucket, then turn wordless out. Finished enough, now I will out too, Mr. Whitman in scandalous hand with a leaf to hold my place. Rivering. Greening. It all stops, water too silty and feet booted, she crooks in a moss-tree and is lost, forgets even to ask for moccasins. I have wrapped fear into linen and hoped it into lavender, saved for funerary. At noon he looks; returns, admits. Across the tablecloth can ask Where did you come from.”

“We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.”

“Praise not the day until evening has come, a woman until she is burnt, a sword until it is tried, a maiden until she is married, ice until it has been crossed, beer until it has been drunk.”

“You can’t be a rebel without the scars that come with it. Truth is, some days scars are just as ugly as they are beautiful.”