“The influence of a woman's first love is felt on her whole after-existence: never can she dream such dream again. For a woman there is no second-love—youth, hope, belief, are all given to her first attachment; if unrequited, the heart becomes its own Prometheus, creative, ideal, but with the vulture preying upon it for ever.—If deceived, the whole poetry of life is gone; the very essence of poetry is belief, and how can she, whose sweet eager credulity has once learnt the bitter truth—that its reliance was in vain, how can she ever believe again?”

“Don't wake up a woman in love. Let her dream, so that she does not weep when she returns to her bitter reality”

“In her first passion, a woman loves her lover, in all the others all she loves is love.”

“Only after she begins to disengage from her belief in her own helplessness can she break out of the vicious cycle of dependency and its brutal effect in her life.”

“After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”

“Once a woman has given you her heart you can never get rid of the rest of her.”

“Kentucky woman
She shines with her own kind of light.
She'd look at you once
And a day that's all wrong looks all right.
And I love her, God knows, I love her.Kentucky woman,
If she get to know you,
She goin' to own you.
Kentucky woman.”

“This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.”

“Marriage is a union between two persons — one man and one woman. A woman who has given herself up to one, can not give herself up to a second, for her whole dignity requires that she should belong only to this one.”

“She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”