“If love means that one person absorbs the other, then no real relationship exists any more. Love evaporates; there is nothing left to love. The integrity of self is gone.”

My mother, was perfectly horrified when I began shooting and tried to keep me in school, but I would run away and go quail shooting in the woods or trim my dresses with wreaths of wildflowers.

I would like to see every woman know how to handle guns as naturally as they know how to handle babies.

I ain’t afraid to love a man.

A crowned queen was never treated with more reverence than I was by those whole-souled western boys, And for seventeen long years I was just their little sister, sharing both their news of joy and sorrow from home.

Even in the best and most peacefully civilized countries many occasions arise when a woman versed in the knowledge and use of fire arms may find that information and skill of great importance.

After traveling through fourteen foreign countries and appearing before all the royalty and nobility I have only one wish today. That is that when my eyes are closed in death that they will bury me back in that quiet little farm land where I was born.

Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.

[On Sitting Bull] The contents of his pockets were often emptied into the hands of small, ragged little boys, nor could he understand how so much wealth should go brushing by, unmindful of the poor.

Aim at a high mark and you will hit it.

Being a good mother does not call for the same qualities as being a good housewife; a dedication to keeping children clean and tidy may override an interest in their separate development as individuals.

I ain’t afraid to love a man. I ain’t afraid to shoot him either.

Any woman who does not thoroughly enjoy tramping across the country on a clear frosty morning with a good gun and a pair of dogs does not know how to enjoy life.

Any woman who does not thoroughly enjoy tramping across the country on a clear frosty morning with a good gun and a pair of dogs does not know how to enjoy life.

Families are nothing other than the idolatry of duty.

There are always women who will take men on their own terms. If I were a man I wouldn’t bother to change while there are women like that around.

Housework is work directly opposed to the possibility of human self-actualization.

The past is no more; the future not yet. Nothing exists except the here and now. Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at our hands.

If heaven exists, to know that there’s laughs, that would be a great thing.

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.

You must accept the fact that there is no help but self-help. I cannot tell you how to gain freedom since freedom exists within you.

Love is life on a higher plain of existence, working through man to unite the forces of nature into a perfect whole.

It’s a struggle but that’s why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.