“I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn”

On the inspiration she received from reading, and the works of L. Frank Baum.

Attributed in Civilization's Quotations : Life's Ideal (2002) by Richard Alan Krieger, p. 132, and many places on the internet, this was actually stated by Vincent van Gogh in a letter to Anthon van Rappard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthon_van_Rappard (18 August 1885) http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let528/letter.html, also rendered "I keep on making what I can’t do yet in order to learn to be able to do it."
Misattributed
Variant: I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.

Orders to the 57th Infantry Regiment, at the Battle of Gallipoli (25 April 1915); as quoted in Studies in Battle Command http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/army/csi-battles.htm by Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College, p. 89; also quoted in Turkey (2007) by Verity Campbell, p. 188
Variant translation: I am not ordering you to fight, I am ordering you to die.
Context: Men, I am not ordering you to attack. I am ordering you to die. In the time that it takes us to die, other forces and commanders can come and take our place.

Variant: I think I need to face
what I could have been in order to understand and accept what I am.
Source: Where Rainbows End

A Factless Autobiography, Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 73
The Book of Disquiet
Original: Para compreender, destruí-me.

James Vinson & D. L. Kirkpatrick (eds.), Contemporary Novelists, 2nd edition, (London: St. James Press, 1976). http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4121/Bainbridge-Beryl-Margaret-Beryl-Bainbridge-comments.html

To Raoul Nordling
The Race to Liberate Paris, warfarehistorynetwork.com https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/the-race-to-liberate-paris/

Source: The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877), IV
Context: Well, granted that it was only a dream, yet the sensation of the love of those innocent and beautiful people has remained with me for ever, and I feel as though their love is still flowing out to me from over there. I have seen them myself, have known them and been convinced; I loved them, I suffered for them afterwards. Oh, I understood at once even at the time that in many things I could not understand them at all … But I soon realised that their knowledge was gained and fostered by intuitions different from those of us on earth, and that their aspirations, too, were quite different. They desired nothing and were at peace; they did not aspire to knowledge of life as we aspire to understand it, because their lives were full. But their knowledge was higher and deeper than ours; for our science seeks to explain what life is, aspires to understand it in order to teach others how to love, while they without science knew how to live; and that I understood, but I could not understand their knowledge.