“Life, it is true, is a process of decisions and alternatives, the conscious awareness and acceptance of limitations. Experience, nevertheless, to say nothing of history, seems clearly to indicate that it is not possible to banish or to falsify any human need without ourselves undergoing falsification and loss.”

“As a spirit having a human experience, you can choose to not merely exist but to be fully conscious and aware of living in a limited world. When you take a conscious part in life and its multitudes of choices, you won't let life happen to you - you will make life happen for you.”

“However, Hardy's relationship with nature is a dialectical one. While he indicates that he recognizes how human perception shapes nature, he nevertheless accepts nature as possessed of its own agency, as working through its cycle regardless of human perception, understanding, or attempted control. In essence, it claims a power apart from that with which humans may have imbued it. Even when humanity has lost faith in the possibility of renewal through nature, nature as Hardy describes it fights back, attempting to force human consciousness to acknowledge her power, her ability to transform life.”

“The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.”

“The true function of logic ... as applied to matters of experience ... is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is”

“Self-acceptance is a way of viewing oneself compassionately, without condemnation or justification. It is a starting point in life which makes other things possible. It celebrates the fullness of joy of being alive and of being who we are: accepting ourselves, however, does not mean embracing our neuroses or bad habits and celebrating them as if they were virtues. On the contrary, self-acceptance involves loving ourselves enough to accept painful truths about ourselves. . . . Self-acceptance is, at its simplest, the experience of one's self, here and now, as a complete human being, with all the glories and problems that condition entails.”