A Woman of Substance

I have the heart of a man, not of a woman, and I am not afraid of anything…
–ELIZABETH I, Queen of England

the will to live is the strongest force in the world

Through all the vicissitudes of her life, whenever she had faced the gravest problems imaginable, she had been totally abandoned and so forced to depend entirely on her own resources.

Now, in the shadows and stillness of the night, the area appeared to her as a petrified forest, suspended in time and space, inanimate, frozen and lifeless.

Forgotten memories, nostalgic and poignant, rushed back to her with force and clarity. Images, no longer nebulous and abandoned, took living form.

He had once told Tony Osborne that the bricks and mortar of the store were wrought from her great vision, her amazing facility for finance, and her uncanny ability to rise from the most impossible situations to triumph.

that if character did determine a man’s destiny then every man and woman created their own heaven or hell.

We are each the authors of our own lives, Emma. We live in what we have created. There is no way to shift the blame and no one else to accept the accolades.’

no one ever escaped the past. It was the burden of the present and of the future and you carried it with you always.

The crystal flakes fell in glittering white flurries, swirling and eddying in the wind, brushing up against the window and coating it with a light film as delicate and as fine as white lace.