You must encounter, confront life. Life loves the liver of it, ladies. It is for you to increase your virtues. There is that in the human spirit which will not be gunned down even by death. There is no person here who is over one year old who hasn’t slept with fear, or pain or loss or grief, or terror, and yet we have all arisen, have made whatever absolutions we were able to, or chose to, dressed, and said to other human beings, “Good morning. How are you? Fine, thanks.” Therein lies our chance toward nobleness—not nobility—but nobleness, the best of a human being is in that ability to overcome.

Excerpt from Maya Angelou's Commencement Address at Wellesley College, 1982.

"It is the very ideal of a library for young ladies, with cozy nooks and corners, where a book is twice a book; with sunny windows, some of them thrown out into deep bays; with galleries, reached by winding stairs, where the girls seem to have a keen delight in coiling themselves away in such mysterious fashion that you can only see above the balustrade a curly head bending over some book, doubtless found more fascinating than it could be if simply spread out on the table below."

—Edward Abbott on the library in Wellesley’s College Hall, as reported in the August 1876 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine