“When you can't wait for your ship to come in, you've got to row out to it.”

“I think the mirror should be tilted slightly upward when it's reflecting life--toward the cheerful, the tender, the compassionate, the brave, the funny, the encouraging, all those things.”

“The use of talent is far more important than the possession of talent.”

“I want everybody to be smart. As smart as they can be. A world of ignorant people is too dangerous to live in.”

“A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.”

“In the struggle to remain a complete person and to love from her fullness instead of her inadequacy a woman may appear hard. She may feel her early conditioning tugging her in the direction of surrender, but she ought to remember that she was originally loved for herself; she ought to hang on to herself and not find herself nagging, helpless, irritable and trapped. Perhaps I am not old enough yet to promise that the self-reliant woman is always loved, but she cannot be lonely as long as there are people in the world who need her joy and her strength, but certainly in my experience it has always been so. Lovers who are free to go when they are restless always come back; lovers who are free to change remain interesting. The bitter animosity and obscenity of divorce is unknown where individuals have not become Siamese twins. A lover who comes to your bed of his own accord is more likely to sleep with his arms around you all night than a lover who has nowhere else to sleep.”

“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?”