“I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.”

To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect.

When women can support themselves, have entry to all the trades and professions, with a house of their own over their heads and a bank account, they will own their bodies and be dictators in the social realm.

Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.

Woman’s discontent increases in exact proportion to her development.

Woman’s degradation is in mans idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man.

I am always busy, which is perhaps the chief reason why I am always well.

The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.

The great lesson that nature seems to teach us at all ages is self-dependence, self-protection, self-support. In the hours of our keenest sufferings all are thrown wholly on themselves for consolation.

Oh, the shortcomings and inconsistency of the average human being, especially when this human being is a man trying to manage women’s affairs!

Though motherhood is the most important of all the professions – requiring more knowledge than any other department in human affairs – there was no attention given to preparation for this office.

A woman will always be dependent until she holds a purse of her own.

Because man and woman are the complement of one another, we need woman’s thought in national affairs to make a safe and stable government.

Men as a general rule have very little reverence for trees.

You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman.

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.

I shall not grow conservative with age.

Give an inch, he’ll take an ell.

You are like a wrecked ship in the depths of the ocean, collapsed and eroded but still, full of pearl oysters.

But the act of holding on speaks to me so much more about a human heart than the courage of letting go ever could.

These poets and their metaphors lied to me/ you never felt like a mountain I wished to climb/ or a stream I would let myself float in/ or a scent I was dying to bottle in/ these poets lie when they talk of love.

All my life has been a struggle to know, what to hold on and what to let go, but still, i end up sitting in the corner of the room with a flickering candle, whimpering, naked, shuddering, lost.

Stop giving your infant heart/ wrapped in blind vows/ white lies/ and a haunted past/ stop asking for love/ if you don’t know how to give any/ stop hurting others/ stop it/ stop it/ just fucking stop it.

Without literature, life is hell.

It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.