I belong to no race nor time.
I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.
-Zora Neale Hurston

I am woman
above everything else.
-Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

I'm a Woman.
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal Woman,
that's me.
-Maya Angelou

Every woman I have ever known
has made a lasting impression on my soul.
-Audre Lorde

One is not born a woman,
one becomes one.
-Simone de Beauvoir

I came here to create a world
As strong, renewable, fertile,
As the world of nature all around me.
-May Sarton

Women, please let your own sun, your
concentrated energy, your own submerged
authentic vital power shine out from you.

We are no longer the moon.
Today we are truly the sun.
We will build shining golden cathedrals
at the top of crystal mountains, East of
the land of the Rising Sun.

Women, when you paint your own portrait,
do not forget to put the golden dome at
the top of your head.
-Raicho Hiratsuko

Not all of us have to possess
earthshaking talent.
Just common sense and love will do.
-Myrtle Auvil

To know a thing,
dip yourself in it like pen and ink,
let it write you in its own words.
-Elizabeth Ayres

Life can only become what we dream
if we become the expression of the dream
we desire to live.
-Ann Mortifee

What's the world for you
if you can't make it up the way you want it?
-Toni Morrison

It is always hard to believe
that the will to change something
does not produce an immediate change.
-Janet Frame

A woman is a full circle.
Within her is the power
to create, nurture and transform.
-Diane Mariechild

The especial genius of women,
I believe to be
electrical in movement,
intuitive in function,
spiritual in tendency.
-Margaret Fuller

We are cultivators of
the unsayable, weavers
of singulars, migrant
workers in search of
floating gardens as yet
unsown, as yet unharvested.
-Lucha Corpi

I want to be able to talk to everybody I can
as deeply as I can.
I want to be able to sleep in an open field,
to travel west, to walk freely at night.
-Sylvia Plath

I want to live
and feel all the shades, tones and variations
of mental and physical experience possible in life.
-Sylvia Plath

What we truly and earnestly aspire to be,
that in some sense we are.
-Anna Jameson

A woman with a voice
is by definition a strong woman.
But the search to find that voice
can be remarkably difficult.
-Melinda Gates

With stammering lips and insufficient sound,
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature.
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning

There is no doubt in my mind,
that I have found out how to begin
(at 40) to say something in my own voice.
-Virginia Woolf

The slender, shy and sensitive girl
is woman now,
her words a power in the Ebon land.
-Margaret Walker

Your motto:
Be Bold.
Be Free.
Be Truthful.
-Brenda Ueland

I think it's time to speak my truth
more passionately.
-Marion Woodman

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties
through my love for truth;
and truth rewarded me.
-Simone de Beauvoir

It takes great courage
to break with one's past history
and stand alone.
-Marion Woodman

Until you learn to name your ghosts
and to baptise your hopes,
you have not yet been born;
you are still the creation of others.
-Maria Cardinal

You only need claim the events of your life
to make yourself yours.
When you truly possess all you have been and done,
which may take some time,
you are fierce with reality.
-Florida Scott-Maxwell

You cannot find peace
by avoiding life.
-Virginia Woolf

I have lived my life according to this principle:
If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it.
-Simone Weil

When faced with a difficult challenge, remember the tools...
the telescope, the wide-angle lens and the microscope.
-Martha Stewart

A magnifying glass
has the purpose to enlarge.
What?
The negative or the positive?
In whom?
-Sivananda Radha

To make your unknown known -
that is the important thing.
-Georgia O'Keeffe

I like to think of myself as an artist,
and my life as my greatest work of art.
Every moment is a moment of creation,
and each moment of creation
contains infinite possibilities.
-Shakti Gawain

The body is not a thing, it is a situation;
it is our grasp on the world
and our sketch of our project.
-Simone de Beauvoir

But always to her, red and green cabbages
were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry.
Life has no weapons against a woman like that.
-Edna Ferber

We are volcanoes.
When we women offer our experience
as our truth, as human truth,
all the maps change.
There are new mountains.
-Ursula L. Le Guin

When sleeping women wake,
mountains move.
-Chinese Proverb

If there be a faith
which can remove mountains,
it is faith in one's own power.
-Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Without the energy that lifts mountains,
how am I to live?
-Mirabai

There are no signposts in the sea.
-Vita Sackville-West

Those whom we support
hold us up in life.
-Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

There is no support so strong
as the strength that enables one to stand alone.
-Ellen Glasgow

It is in the knowledge
of the genuine conditions of our lives
that we must draw our strength to live
and our reasons for living.
-Simone de Beauvoir

In city, in suburb, in forest,
no way to stretch out the arms -
so if you would grow,
go straight up or straight down.
-Denise Leverov

I am a feminist and what that means to me
is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black:
It means that I must undertake
to love myself and to respect myself
as though my very life depends on self-love and self-respect.
-June Jordan

You are the light and love of your life.
Never forget it.
-Mary A. Gravelle

When a woman becomes her own best friend,
life is easier.
-Diane von Furstenberg

The way you treat yourself
sets the standard for others.
-Sonya Friedman

A strange beautiful woman
met me in the mirror
the other night.
Hey,
I said,
What are you doing here?
She asked me
the same thing.
-Marilyn Nelson Waniek

The fog in my mirror

slowly unveils

a woman of bronze

earth and fire.

-Naomi Quinonez

Plant your own garden
and decorate your own soul,
instead of waiting for someone
to bring you flowers.
-Veronica A. Shoffstall

There is no private life
which has not been determined
by a wider public life.
-George Eliot

There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge
and to maintain balance within it a precarious business.
But I must not forget that, for me,
being with people or even with one beloved person
for any length of time without solitude is even worse.
I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces.
-May Sarton

Solitude is my element,
and the reason is that extreme awareness of other people
(all naturally solitary people must feel this)
precludes awareness of one's self,
so after a while the self no longer knows that it exists.
-May Sarton

A room of one's own
isn't nearly enough.
A house, or, best,
an island of one's own.
-Lillian Hellman

I need, absolutely, to be alone.
-Jeanne Moreau

I am the kind of woman
that likes to enjoy herselves in peace.
-Alice Walker

She would not exchange her solitude for anything.
Never again to be forced to move
to the rhythms of others.
-Tillie Olsen

For each of us as women,
there is a dark place within
where hidden and growing
our true spirit rises.
-Audre Lorde

I love people,
I love my family, my children...
but inside myself is a place
where I live all alone
and that's where you renew your spring
that never dries up.
-Pearl Buck

I have dreamed in my life,
dreams that have stayed with me ever after,
and changed my ideas;
they have gone through and through me,
like wine through water,
and altered the color of my mind.
-Emily Bronte

Dreams are illustrations...
from the book your soul
is writing about you.
-Marsha Norman

Only of one thing I am sure:
when I dream
I am always ageless.
-Elizabeth Coatsworth

What is it in us we have not mastered yet?
-May Sarton

I've got the key to my castle in the air,
but whether I can unlock the door
remains to be seen.
-Louisa May Alcott

There are things to confess that enrich the world,
and things that need not be said.
-Joni Mitchell

There are chapters in every life
which are seldom read
and certainly not aloud.
-Carol Shields

I will have no locked cupboards
in my life.
-Gertrude Bell

We have lived our lives
behind a mask.
Sooner or later -
if we are lucky -
the mask will be smashed.
-Marion Woodman

No more masks! No more mythologies!
-Muriel Rukeyser

However veiled,
the feminine is always naked.
-Marion Woodman

Femininity is Being
that knows its bone truth.
-Marion Woodman

My teacher told me one thing,
Live in the soul.

When that was so,
I used to go naked,
and dance.
-Lalla

I am wild, I will sing to the trees,
I will sing to the stars in the sky
-Sara Teasdale

A woman should be like a single flower,
not a whole bouquet.
-Anna Held

The nature of this flower
is to bloom.
-Alice Walker

I am rooted,
but I flow.
-Virginia Woolf

To have ideas is to gather flowers.
To think is to weave them into garlands.
-Anne Swetchine

How simple a thing it seems to me
that to know ourselves as we are,
we must know our mothers' names.
-Alice Walker

In search of my mothers' garden,
I found my own.
-Alice Walker

A house is no home
unless it contain food and fire
for the mind
as well as for the body.
-Margaret Fuller

I only read what I am hungry for
at the moment when I have an appetite for it,
and then I do not read, I eat.
-Simone Weil

Eating is never so simple as hunger.
-Erica Jong

I am a better person
when I have less on my plate.
-Elizabeth Gilbert

I am inclined to think that eating is a private thing
and should be done alone, like other body functions.
-Sylvia Ashton-Warner

Order is life to me.
I could, if necessary, live in dirt
but never in disorder.
-Margaret Anderson

Daily, hourly we must keep the crystal clear
that the colors may assume their order.
-Florida Scott-Maxwell

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
-Virginia Woolf

We all choose how to look at life.
-Taylor Caldwell

For some of us,
good books and beautiful writing are our ultimate solace,
even more comforting than exquisite food.
-Anne Lamott

She had certain thoughts which were companions,
ideas which were like older and wiser friends.
-Willa Cather

I will hew great windows for my soul.
-Angela Morgan

To a life that seizes
Upon content,
Locality seems
But accident.
-Elizabeth Coatsworth

There are years that ask questions
and years that answer.
-Zora Neale Hurston

Put your ear down to your soul
and listen hard.
-Anne Sexton

I began to realize
that life is a growth stage
I'm going through.
-Ellen Goodman

The events of our lives
happen in a sequence of time,
but in their significance to ourselves,
they find their own order.
-Eudora Welty

As I look back upon my life,
I see that every part of it was a preparation for the next.
The most trivial of incidents fits into the larger pattern
like a mosaic in a preconceived design.
-Margaret Sanger

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically.
We grow sometimes in one dimension,
and not in another, unevenly.
We grow partially. We are relative.
We are mature in one realm, childish in another.
The past, present and future
mingle and pull us backward, forward,
or fix us in the present.
We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
-Anais Nin

I fling my past behind me like a robe
Worn threadbare in the seams, and out of date.
I have outgrown it.
-Edna Wheeler Wilcox

The past is never where you think you left it.
-Katherine Anne Porter

Why can't I try on different lives, like dresses,
to see which fits best and is more becoming?
-Sylvia Plath

Time is a dressmaker,
specializing in alterations.
-Faith Baldwin

Occupation is essential.
-Virginia Woolf

The days you work
are your best days.
-Georgia O'Keeffe

Whatever I do, the responsibility is mine,
but like the one who plants an orchard,
what comes of what I do,
the fruit, will be for others.
-Lalla

We can't take any credit for our talents.
It's how we use them that counts.
-Madeleine L'Engle

Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know;
it doesn't do to be run away with.
You must keep the reins.
-George Eliot

There is a good deal of unmapped country within us
which would have to be taken into account
in explanation of our gusts and storms.
-George Eliot

The cloud never comes
from the corner of the horizon
from which we watch for it.
-Elizabeth Gaskell

Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.
-Anais Nin

Being empty
means that there are no obstacles in my mind
to keep me from loving what is,
whatever it is.
-Byron Katie

Where music thundered
let the mind be still,
Where the will triumphed
let there be no will,
What light revealed,
now let the dark fulfill.
-May Sarton

Determined to save her life,
she wore only white,
tended her garden
and a few close friends,
baked bread daily.

And, in one year alone,
wrote 366 poems.
-Marion Woodman

O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
-May Sarton

My soul has gained
the freedom of the night.
-Elizabeth Bibesco

I see the wise woman.

She carries a blanket of compassion.
She wears a robe of wisdom.
Around her throat flutters a veil of shifting shapes.
From her shoulders, a mantle of power flows.
A story band encircles her forehead.
She stitches a quilt; she spins fibers into yarn;
she knots; she sews; she weaves.
She ties the threads of our lives together.
She forms a web of spiraling threads.
-Susun Weed

The weaver is nothing
without exquisite care for the loom.
-Paula Reeves

I think with my body
which effervesces
-Anna Swir

Feeling loves a subdued light.
-Anne Swetchine

I went everywhere with longing
in my eyes, until here
in my own house

I felt truth
Filling my sight.
-Lalla

I have made a great discovery.
What I love belongs to me.
Not the chairs and tables in my house,
but the masterpieces of the world.
It is only a question of loving them enough.
-Elizabeth Bibesco

...one of the goals of life
is to try and be in touch
with one's own most personal themes -
the values, ideas, styles, colors
that are the touchstones of one's own individual life,
its real texture and substance.
-Gloria Vanderbilt

One cannot collect
all the beautiful shells on the beach.
One can collect only a few,
and they are more beautiful
if they are few.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh

At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough.
You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it.
It is enough. No records of it need be kept
and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to.
-Toni Morrison

Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
-Mary Oliver

She was learning to love moments.
To love moments for themselves.
-Gwendolyn Brooks

Spend the afternoon.
You can't take it with you.
-Annie Dilliard

I finally figured out
the only reason to be alive
is to enjoy it.
-Rita Mae Brown

I don't want to get to the end of my life
and find that I have lived just the length of it.
I want to have lived the width of it as well.
-Diane Ackerman

If I had to live my life again,
I'd make the same mistakes,
only sooner.
-Tallulah Bankhead

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
-Mary Oliver

The maturing of a woman
who has continued to grow
is a beautiful thing to behold.
-Naomi Wolf

A beautiful woman delights the eye;
a wise woman, the understanding;
a pure one, the soul.
-Minna Thomas Antrim

The attributes of a great lady
may still be found in the rule of the four S's:
Sincerity, Simplicity, Sympathy and Serenity.
-Emily Post

She was so sincere
that she would only think one thought at a time;
and her whole nature would be behind it.
-Phyllis Bottome

Let our lives be pure as snowfields,
where our footsteps leave a mark,
but not a stain.
-Anne Swetchine

She accepts herself as part of the greater plan
through which life eternally moves
and she is firmly grounded on the lap of Mother Nature.
-Marion Woodman

Every story is a luminous thread
that becomes part of a larger fabric,
a fabric we are weaving together for the whole world,
and this fabric, is a thing of immense importance and beauty.
-Sue Monk Kidd

I see the wise woman.

She carries a blanket of compassion.
She wears a robe of wisdom.
Around her throat flutters a veil of shifting shapes.
From her shoulders, a mantle of power flows.
A story band encircles her forehead.
She stitches a quilt; she spins fibers into yarn;
she knits; she sews; she weaves.
She ties the threads of our lives together.
She forms a web of spiraling threads.
-Susun Weed

My heart has grown rich
with the passing of the years.
-Sara Teasdale

Ask within for her advice.
She is the Mother of the Ages.
Nothing surprises her.
She has seen it all.
-Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I am woman old
I have so many selves that I am none
-Kathleen Raine

The older I get,
the greater power I seem to have to help the world;
I am like a snowball - the further I am rolled the more I gain.
-Susan B. Anthony

As a woman I have no country.
As a woman I want no country.
As a woman, my country is the whole world.
-Virginia Woolf

Few are the giants of the soul
who actually feel that the human race
is their family circle.
-Elizabeth Wray Taylor