Only by pursuing the extremes in one's nature, with all its contradictions, appetites, aversions, rages, can one hope to understand a little ... oh, I admit only a very little ... of what life is about.
The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.
We do not make beams from the hollow, decaying trunk of the fallen oak. We use the upsoaring tree in the full vigor of its sap.
We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
Whatever glory belongs to the race for a development unprecedented in history for the given length of time, a full share belongs to the womanhood of the race.
There is a potential heroine in every woman.
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
I hear the singing of the lives of women. The clear mystery, the offering, the pride.
The sexes in each species of beings . . . are always true equivalents-equals but not identicals.
For women there are, undoubtedly, great difficulties in the path, but so much the more to overcome. First no woman would say "I am but a woman!" But a woman! What more can you ask to be?
Ability is sexless.
We bear the world and we make it.... There was never a great man who had not a great mother-it is hardly an exaggeration.
Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels.
There may be ways in which we can work for change. We don't have to do dramatic things or devote our entire lives to it. We can lead normal lives but at the same time try hard not to be bystanders.
Some people give time, some money, some their skills and connections, some literally give their life's blood . . . but everyone has something to give.
Though I have no productive worth, I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity.
I was once the typical daughter, then the easily recognizable wife, and then the quintessential mother. I seem always to have reminded people of someone in their family. Perhaps I am just the triumph of Plain Jane.
God wastes nothing.
To be a housewife is ... a difficult, a wrenching, sometimes ungrateful job if it's looked on as only a job. Regarded as a profession, it is the noblest as it is the most ancient of the catalogue. Let none persuade us differently, or the world will be lost indeed.
It's this no-nonsense side of women that is pleasant to deal with. They are the real sportsmen.