Stephanie Kwolek quotes:

I hope I'm saving lives. There are very few people in their careers that have the opportunity to do something to benefit mankind.

Not long ago, I got to meet some troopers whose lives had been saved. They came with their wives, their children, their parents. It was a very moving occasion.

I guess that's just the life of an inventor: what people do with your ideas takes you totally by surprise.

[At DuPont,] I was very fortunate that I worked under men who were very much interested in making discoveries and inventions. They were very much interested in what they were doing, and they left me alone. And I was able to experiment on my own, and I found this very stimulating. It appealed to the creative person in me.

All sorts of things can happen when you're open to new ideas and playing around with things.

I tell young people to reach for the stars. And I can't think of a greater high than you could possibly get than by inventing something.

I was working with these very long-chain ... extended-chain polymers, where you had a lot of benzene rings in them. ... Transforming a polymer solution from a liquid to a fiber requires a process called spinning. ... We spun it and it spun beautifully. It [Kevlar] was very strong and very stiff-unlike anything we had made before. I knew that I had made a discovery. I didn't shout "Eureka!" but I was very excited, as was the whole laboratory excited, and management was excited, because we were looking for something new. Something different. And this was it.