1.“If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
2.“I respect myself and insist upon it from everybody. And because I do it, I then respect everybody, too.”
3.“Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”
4.“I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.”
5.“The biggest problem that women have is being ambivalent about their own power…We should be comfortable with the idea of wielding power. We shouldn’t feel that it detracts from our femininity.”
6.“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
7.“There is a truth deep down inside of you that has been waiting for you to discover it, and that truth is this: you deserve all good things life has to offer.”
8.“Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way.”
9.“Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.”
10.“I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.”
11.“The most successful people I know have figured out how to live with criticism, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.”
12.“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.”
13.“After all those years as a woman hearing‘not thin enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not this enough, not that enough,’ almost overnight I woke up one morning and thought, I am enough.”
14.“I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself.”
15.“Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.”
16.“Yet if a woman never lets herself go, how will she ever know how far she might have got? If she never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?”
17.“When people are insulting you, there is nothing so good for them as not to say a word—just to look at them and think. When you will not fly into a passion people know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage, and they are not, and they say stupid things they wished they hadn't said afterward. There's nothing so strong as rage, except what makes you hold it in—that's stronger. It's a good thing not to answer your enemies.”
18.“Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will bring few regrets, and life will become a beautiful success.”