My highlights from the book:

1. At the time of her death on August 9, 1980, Jacqueline Cochran held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any other pilot, male or female, in aviation history.

2. Jacqueline Cochran was a self-named, self-created phenomenon. Whatever the circumstances of her birth, she must have been born fighting. And she never stopped. True, she had a poverty-stricken background, but somehow I think that wherever or whoever she was at birth, her native acumen, extraordinary energy, talent, and sheer guts would inevitably have driven her to the very top.

3. Jackie was an irresistible force. Time and time again in the many, many interviews I was so kindly granted, the repeated theme was "Jackie just could not be stopped." And indeed, this driving, cussed determination is signally evident in Jackie's own writings. 

4. Her unremitting persistence is clear in everything she did, from regaining the doll of which she was robbed at the age of six to her need to be the world's top aviatrix. Generous, egotistical, penny-pinching, compassionate, sensitive, aggressive -indeed, an explosive study in contradictions—Jackie was consistent only in the overflowing energy with which she attacked the challenge of being alive. 

5. This is a biography of an authentic, native-born American heroine-a real life "Li'l Orphan Annie"—who battled her way through adventures that Annie never even dreamed. It is built on autobiographical scenes from a life lived flat out.

6. Jackie was loved and hated probably just about equally in her seventysome years of living. But no one who encountered her was indifferent, or indeed ever forgot her. But whatever she did was done her way. And Jackie believed in jumping into any adventure feetfirst.

7. To live without risk for me would have been tantamount to death.

8. You’ve got to be aggressive to do that and you've got to have guts to go out and get exactly what you want. 

9. Until I was eight years old I had no shoes. My bed was usually a pallet on the floor and sometimes just the floor. Food consisted of the barest essentials-sometimes nothing except what I foraged for myself in the woods. My dresses were made from flour sacks.

10. I liked being different from them, stronger in fact. And I used my strength to get what I wanted.

11. If fending for yourself carries its satisfactions, I had my share of satisfactions in my childhood.

12. I want one more than anything before in my whole life. I know I can't have it and I don't cry. I lose myself in a fantasy of all the things I'll buy when I can buy whatever I want.

13. Hunger was a permanent way of feeling when I was growing up.

14. As a young girl I used to ask myself: am I illegitimate? Who were my real parents? Why would a mother give away her child? But having gone through my childhood never knowing exactly what happened or why I was never officially adopted by anyone, not even my foster family, the letters didn't hold much sway over me. I didn't care what they said. I realize that might sound strange, but what could the knowledge have added to my life then? More important, what could it have taken away from me?

15. Whenever I turned on a light, I'd think of how my foster family had been able to sit back and sit around that goddamn mojo lamp. Not me.

16. "I can fly as well as any man entered in that race." I didn't see it as being boastful so much as speaking the truth. I learned through hard work and hard living that if I didn't speak the truth about myself, no one else would fill in the missing pieces. I never let my insecurities stop me.

17. I always knew I was different from the others.

18. I'll never fully understand why my Miss Bostwick came south that next year and took me in her arms. All I know is that she became the greatest positive influence on my early life. From her I learned how to take care of myself, to stay clean and neat in spite of the sneering I always received from my sisters. I learned love from Miss Bostwick when she touched me. I learned how to turn my back to what others thought-to turn my back on them if that's what had to be done. My first hair ribbon-that comb and brush set-those hours of reading together in the afternoons-the prunes. I wanted desperately to thank her many years later for showing me that the rest of the world was out there for me. I went to Cincinnati to find her, my very own Miss Bostwick, and called every Bostwick in the telephone directory with no luck. I wanted to see her lovely face again and put my arms around her in the same way she had hugged me. But she was never to be found. When she stopped teaching after that second year of my schooling, my formal education stopped too.

19. Informally, I never stopped learning.

20. I like to tell others that I passed through the School of Hard Knocks of which there are no real graduates because you simply keep on learning until you die

21. Later I would find that my horizons were limited only by my imagination and knowledge.

22. "What are you going to be when you grow up, Jackie?" they'd ask me. I never wavered in my response. "I'm going to be rich," I'd say, knowing even then that they thought I was silly or crazed. "I'll wear fine clothes, own my own automobile, and have adventures all over the world." They'd laugh. I was certain that's where I was going, I felt no embarrassment about my big dreams. No dreams, no future. They could laugh, but most of my mill friends wanted as little from life as they were destined to get.

23. To get the best performance, to do better than anyone has ever done before, you've got to take chances.

24. You almost had to have been there to know what such a range of existences did for me. Because of where I came from and then where I went, I ended up understanding intimately one very sustaining line of life: I could never have so little that I hadn't had less. It took away my fear. It pushed me harder than I might ever have pushed myself otherwise. The poverty provided me with a kind of cocky confidence and made me relatively happy with what I had at any given moment.

25. There weren't night and day differences between Floyd Odlum and me. Temperamentally we may have been miles apart, but when it came to knowing what we wanted out of life-security, power, and a certain kind of fame-we were very much alike. And work. Hard work was always a tie that bound us together. When it came to schemes and dreams, Floyd had as many as did.

26. I decided there was a real place for women like myself in aviation and I'd take it up as a profession. I'd do more than just play at it. I'd make it pay and I'd learn everything I could possibly learn about flying.

27. Jackie always felt that there was nobody better than she was. She was equal to anybody and had as much confidence as anybody. That's why she was able to accomplish so much. If somebody else can do it, so can I. That was her theory, her motto. 

28. Her philosophy was: if I can learn something from you, there's a basis for a friendship.

29. She could be ruthless when she wanted to pursue something, and she'd go at her goal with an intensity that wouldn't stop.

30. When she made up her mind, Jackie Cochran was like a steel railroad going right down the track. She had a great sense of her own worth and she knew she was good.

31. People didn't know what to do with Jackie Cochran.

32. I've always been a very good salesman. My whole life has been built on promotion and sales and it doesn't matter whether you are selling washtubs or cosmetics or human ideas. If you can present it well, you can make people believe you. If there is a bigger principle in back of it, you get what you want.

33. Believe me, breaking the sound barrier and being the first woman to do it was the greatest thrill of my life.

34. "I have found adventure in flying, in world travel, in business, and even close at hand. Adventure is a state of mind-and spirit. It comes with faith, for with complete faith there is no fear of what faces you in life or death. In truth, I ended up living a life of continuous adventure. I think it was Peter Pan who said, "To die will be an awfully big adventure."

35. Jackie never lost sight of her main objectives—living the good life, and always aiming for the very top in any endeavor — nor did she even begin to doubt that if she tried hard enough and fought hard enough and maneuvered hard enough, she would not only achieve what she most wanted, but could even affect the course of history—and have one hell of a lot of fun doing it. As indeed she did.

36. Sometimes even Jackie Cochran couldn't believe what she had accomplished. —Chuck Yeager