“If I grew up in the simple-minded belief that women were as strong and intelligent as men, it was because I came from a society that had once believed it.”

“Besides its content and methods, the cuisine devised by squaws and hillbilly women, as well as slave women, had another thing in common, which was the belief that you made do with whatever you could lay hands on--pigs' entrails, turnip tops, cowpeas, terrapins, catfish--anything that didn't bite you first.”

“The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes--to me a beatitude--is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women--or men--can suffer is to be bereft of their past.”

“They founded a society based not upon currency and commodities but on the elementary notion that if you failed to raise enough to eat, you would go hungry.”

“We started out making men in about the state of mind which I suppose created them in the first place -- we had run out of kinds of women, and had to think of something else.”

“I think men are afraid to be with a successful woman, because we are terribly strong, we know what we want and we are not fragile enough.”

“[W]alking sometimes in a perfectly desolate plain where there have been no houses nor trees to guide me, I have been occasionally compelled to remain stationary for hours together, waiting till the rain came before continuing my journey.”