“I always believed that women have rights and that there are some women that are intelligent enough to claim those rights. There are some others that are stupid enough not to. It is as cut-and dried as that. It doesn't matter if you are a woman or not; in this life, to earn your place you have to fight for it.”

“It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case.”

“To claim - to claim repeatedly - that you are innocent of what it is claimed by others that you have done, or might have done, or are in some quarters strongly suspected of having done, is never enough unless others, numberous others, will say it for you.”

“Have you done enough today to earn the right to live tomorrow?”

“It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.”

“It occurred to me that there have always been selkie women: women who did not seem to belong to this world, because they did not fit into prevailing notions of what women were supposed to be. And if you did not fit into those notions, in some sense you weren't a woman. Weren't even quite human. The magical animal woman is, or can be, a metaphor for those sorts of women.”