“It was the call of all those fortuities… which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate.”

“Her clarity gave her purpose and her purpose gave her clarity.”

“We called her Mother Earth. Because she gave birth to us, and then we sucked her dry.”

“We did not flinch but gave our lives to save Greece when her fate hung on a razor's edge.”

“Let the wife make her husband glad to come home and let him make her sorry to see him leave.”

“She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.”

“Nothing whatever is to be gained by driving the timorous and weak by lies or compulsion into pain which they will resent and responsibility which they will evade. Everything is to be gained by training a woman in knowledge, courage, and physical strength, and leaving it then to her own instinct and her mind to tell her that to create new human beings is worth the discomfort and the suffering she must necessarily undergo. Those in whom the courage to create survives when choice is free and all the facts are known are those best fitted to bring children into the world, and breed in them eagerness and intrepidity. The others will only pass on fear and distaste for life from which individuals and the community suffer far too much already.”

“Jennifer Merrick had stored all her tears inside her, and her pride and courage would never permit her to break down and shed them.”

“Yes, solitude amid her depths has many a hidden balm
Guarded for those who leave her not, to strengthen and to calm.”

“He always thought of the sea as la mar, which is what people call her in spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her, but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fisherman, those who used buoys as floats for their lines or had motorboats bought when the shark lovers had much money, spoke of her as el mar, which is masculine, they spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine, as something that gave or withheld great favors. If she did wild or wicked things, it is because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.”