“The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor. ”

“Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past.”

“If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.”

“Look at my papa here; he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.”

“I only knew the schoolbooks said he "died in the wilderness, of a broken heart.""More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent. ”

“If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry”

“I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be, would be”