It really looks like it's real. You really feel like a little girl. Discovering all these things, is magic.

"Seventy-six years old," she whispers, "and I can still feel like this? Like a little girl with stars in my eyes?"

I looked like this when I was young, and I still do.

You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.

I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.

I've got nervous energy like a kid, still.

She's so young and so impressionable. There's an innocence and a vulnerability that you almost can't really manufacture. It's like a look in the eye that a young girl has that a 23-year-old doesn't.

…I still have a bunch of childlike [energy] in me. I still feel young and vibrant. I don’t ever want to lose that. I still feel that way. I’m 80, but I feel like I’m 30. I really do, physically and emotionally. I was a kid, and I was getting a chance to embark upon a life that I had thought was my impossible dream. Where I grew up, I didn’t think it was going to be possible for me to actually be in show business, to write songs and sing and make records, and all that. But that was my dream. It was what I wanted to do with my life, if possible. And I didn’t think it would be, so no, I wasn’t tripping like that.

I want to make young girls believe that all things are possible. You know they can do exactly or even better than what I'm doing right now. I'm not any super girl from one unique place. No, I'm a local girl from Ughelli. So if this local girl can do it, can come this far from nothing to become something, then you also can do it.

Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.

Young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up power.

Why, she [Sarah Bernhardt] is the youngest person I ever saw, except myself—for I always feel young when I come in the presence of young people.

People expect a lot of me, which is normal and I also want them to, but I am still one of the youngest here.

I am mad the way young girls are mad,
with an offering, an offering.