“And in the act of making things, just by living their daily lives, they also make history. Knitting is clothing made in spare moments, or round the fire, whenever women gathered together... It's something to celebrate-clothes made in love and service, something women have always done.”

“To make a lacy texture of holes and fills, turn around and purl. Pearl is also a kind of colour. Colours are all the colours of the rainbow and the colours between the rainbow colours between. I can never get indigo. Year after year, I wait for indigo, but even when the fashion is navy, you never get indigo, the glow, the long slow glow of indigo in the high night sky.”

“We have been cut off from our souls in the West, and because romantic love has become our religion, we think we can find fulfillment through this extraordinary and powerful force that draws us into an illusion of permanence. Passion makes us feel alive, makes us sing, makes us feel in touch with something powerful and wonderful, just as it would if we followed this meaning in life in a more spiritual practice. In the West it is often through such relationships, through another human being, that we search desperately for something, not knowing it is to be found within ourselves.”

“She turned back to inspect a bank of greens: olive, jade, leaf, kiwi, lime, a silver-green like the back of birch leaves, a bright pistachio.”

“Clothes aren't going to change the world. The women who wear them will.”

“I have gathered a posy of other men's flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.”

“Too many women waste their lives grieving because they do not have something other people tell them they should want. Whether you are happy or not depends to some degree upon outward circumstances, but mostly it depends how you choose to look at things yourself, whether you measure what you have or what you have not.”