What I hope for you is that you live there not as prisoners, ashamed of being women, consenting captives of a psychopathic social system, but as natives. That you will be at home there, keep house there, be your own mistress, with a room of your own. That you will do your work there, whatever you're good at, art or science or tech or running a company or sweeping under the beds, and when they tell you that it's second-class work because a woman is doing it, I hope you tell them to go to hell and while they're going to give you equal pay for equal time. I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is.
- Ursula K LeGuin

Some things...arrive on their own mysterious hour, on their own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever.
- Gail Godwin

Six o'clock in the evening and Alicia is waiting for Jake. She has in fact spent the better part of the last few months waiting for him, something she hates to acknowledge even to herself. Certainly no one else would know it. Her waiting is a near-miracle of camouflage and self-containment. She doesn't sit by the phone, doesn't even stay home. It's something invisible: an inner ear cocked, an ache.
- Elissa Wald, "Holding Fire"

Sail on silver girl, sail on by./ Your time has come to shine. All your dreams are on their way./ See how they shine, Oh, if you need a friend I'm sailing right behind./ Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down. Like a bridge over troubled water, I will ease your mind.
- Paul Simon

It strikes Miranda as bizarre how you could sit for months plotting how to get inside, and then one day you knock, he says come in, and you wonder if it would have truly been that easy all along.
- Thisbe Nissen, The Good People of New York

Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life.
- Wilma Rudolph


You must learn to be still in the midst of activity, and to be vibrantly alive in repose.
- Indira Ghandi


One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are, when you don't come home at night.
- Margaret Mead


Not all who wander are lost.
- J.R.R. Tolkien


too much freedom, i'm learning, can be just as frustrating as not enough. and as with everything in life, i'm still trying to find the balance.
- Audrey Beth Stein


Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong.
- Ella Fitzgerald


You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the things you think you cannot do.
- Eleanor Roosevelt


She began to cry. Just crying—the deep and ugly kind, the kind you lose yourself in, thanking God no one has to see how rubbed and blotched your face becomes, though some detached part of you also wishes there were someone to see you now, to see and understand how sad you are, at heart. They don't see it, of course; you'd never show them.
- Sylvia Brownrigg, The Metaphysical Touch

Never part without loving words to think of during your absence. It may be that you will not meet again in this life.
- Jean Paul Richter

You have to find it. No one else can find it for you.
- Bjorn Borg

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.
- Maya Angelou

When you come to the edge of all the light you know,
and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown,
faith is knowing one of two things will happen:
There will be something solid to stand on,
or you will be taught how to fly.
- Barbara J. Winter

At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.
It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.
You can love completely without complete understanding.
- Norman Maclean (A River Runs Through It)

Do not consider painful what is good for you.
- Euripides


Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned and however early a person’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson a person learns thoroughly.
- Thomas Huxley, British biologist


In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
- Bertrand Russell


If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
- Henry David Thoreau


The most precious possession that ever comes to a man in this world is a woman’s heart.
- Proverb


Love doesn't sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
- Ursula K. Le Guin, writer


Never seem more learned than the people you are with. Wear your learning like a pocket watch and keep it hidden. Do not pull it out to count the hours, but give the time when you are asked.
- Lord Chesterfield

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
- Benjamin Franklin