Why do deprivation, adversity, scarcity, and suffering often produce the best character qualities in us while prosperity, ease, and abundance often produce the worst? There is an invisible pattern in the design of deprivation: deprivation draws out desire. Absence heightens it.

Never underestimate a determined woman!

Headstrong is just a word, Katie - a word others call you when you don't do what they want.

Real men don't dance to other people's tune, instead, they play for others to dance.

If you can be heartless as the first man who visited the space, then there will be nothing impossibe for you to achieve.

She lay outside in the courtyard, staring up at the raindrops… feeling them hit her body… trying to guess where one would land next. The nuns called again, threatening that pneumonia might make an insufferably headstrong child a lot less curious about nature.

You tell me that yes, I can do it. I know. And I may do it, if I so choose.You tell me that no, I cannot. I say, Oh? I shall do it, since you refuse!

Yearn for the opposite, to buck the trend, to be different.

Stubbornness is a weapon.People tend to draw it out when a sensitive part of their identity is threatened—be it dignity, honor, pride, desires, etc. If loaded with righteous resolve, stubbornness can assist in overcoming obstacles and achieving great feats; however, more often than not it is loaded with anger, used as a means of destruction for both the possessor and those whom he turns his weapon upon. It is best utilized by wise individuals who are able to dispassionately perceive if their stubbornness will accomplish good, or if it should be put away and replaced by a humble substitute to spare the lives of everyone affected.

When people who remember her better than me talk of her, she is always described as headstrong and irresponsible, which, if you think about it, are just different words for untameable. The wind is untameable, and so are rivers, and there is something poetic in that.