back in the seventies, when women began to straddle chairs and dance crotch out on television, when all the magazines started featuring behinds and inner thighs as though that's all there is to a woman, well, I shut up altogether.

She didn't even know she had a neck until Jude remarked on it, or that her smile was anything but the spreading of her lips until he saw it as a small miracle.

I've had only two regular women. I liked the small breakable thing inside each one. Whatever their personality, smarts, or looks, something soft lay inside each. Like a bird's breastbone, shaped and chosen to wish on. A little V, thinner than bone and lightly hinged, that I could break with a forefinger if I wanted to, but never did. Want to, I mean. Knowing it was there, hiding from me, was enough.

Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.

Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would only see what there was to see: the eyes of other people.

A woman could be cobra-thin and starving, but if she had grapefruit boobs and raccoon eyes, she was deliriously happy.

You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction.

You don't have to seek anyone else's approval for the life God has given you to live. You don't have to apologize for the strength, fortitude, courage, talent, beauty, or intellect your Creator has given you. Ladies, we all are "God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do" (Ephesians 2:10).

A godly woman's true adornment can't be bought at a department store or acquired in the beauty shop.

You don't have to carry a designer bag that costs more than a car to look cool.

The truth is that a lot of these men don't know how to relate to lovers, so they only view women as sisters or mothers. It truly grieves me! I feel so bad for all these daughters who are awakened for love, but are living among boy/men who are asleep to manhood.

Eve was created to know and walk with God and to make him known to others by reflecting his character in her life. This is a woman's true path to fulfillment and meaning — the only way we will ever discover who we are and find our purpose. And it is accessible to all of us.