“I would not say anything more. If I did say anything, afterwards I would always declare that you made me say it by force!”

How else would God speak to me, if not through my imagination?

I would rather die than do something which I know to be a sin, or to be against God’s will.

But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.

Even though I saw the executioner and the fire, I could not say anything but what I have said.

I used to say, “Go boldly in among the English,” and then I used to go boldly in myself.

One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it.

What concerns this dress is a small thing – less than nothing. I did not take it by the advice of any man in the world.

[Responding to trick query about whether she believed herself in a state of grace:] If I am not, may it please God to bring me into it; if I am, may He preserve me in it.

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

[Before being burned at the stake for her faith:] Hold the cross high so I may see it through the flames.

All battles are first won or lost, in the mind.

Yet you should not marvel if I do not enter that city so quickly.

It is true I wished to escape; and so I wish still: is not this lawful for all prisoners?

… since God commanded me to go, I must do it.

Alas! that my body, clean and whole, never been corrupted, today must be consumed and burnt to ashes!

As for other avocations of women, there are plenty of other women to perform them.

If ever I do escape, no one shall reproach me with having broken or violated my faith, not having given my word to any one, whosoever it may be.

When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward.

I don’t see my Oscar much now. But when I first got it, there was a feeling for weeks afterward that I guess is akin to winning a gold medal in the Olympics.

Read it to the class and then afterward we would talk and I would answer questions. It was really a way of expressing and finding out about where I was at that particular time, so it was very therapeutic for me.

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

If however, you once see your Divine Mother, you will not afterwards find pleasure in all these. Throwing them all aside, you will run to her.

People, whether they know it or not, like their blues singers miserable. They like their blues singers to die afterwards.

It is very pleasant to scratch an itching ring-worm, but the sensation one gets afterwards is very painful and intolerable.