"You're looking for a reason,' she said. 'And that doesn't help. It doesn't change the present."

"We need not avoid our active lives, but simply bring to them a new vision and shift of gravity. for in the center we are rooted in god's love. in such a place there is no need for striving and impatience and dashing about seeking approval."

"I have come here not to find answers, but to find a way to live in a world without any."

"To condemn slavery was one thing-that I could do in my own individual heart-but female ministers!"

"Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now."

"I was wishing I had a story like that one to live inside me with so much loudness you could pick it up on a stethoscope."

"I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time."

"The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life."

"I said, 'Where's all that delivering God's supposed to do?'He snorted. 'You're right, the only deliverance is the one we get for ourselves. The Lord doesn't have any hands and feet but ours.''That doesn't say much for the Lord.''It doesn't say much for us, either."

"I'd chosen the regret I could live with best, that's all. I'd chosen the life I belonged to."

"And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love."

"I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one."

"How do we accomplish this matter of gathering life together in God? We must begin primarily by refocusing our attention keeping our minds and hearts directed toward God. The essence of the centered life is attention to God in all we think, say and do. It is the growing realization of His presence in our most down-to-earth living."

"This surprised me because it made me realize that what I sought was not outside myself. It was within me, already there, waiting. Awakening was really the act of remembering myself, remembering this deep Feminine Source."

"Maybe one reason I had avoided anger was that like a lot of people I had thought there were only two responses to anger: to deny it or to strike out thoughtlessly. But other responses are possible."

"Depressed people do things they wouldn't ordinarily do."

"You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home."

"The ultimate authority of my life is not the Bible, it is not confined between the covers of a book. It is not something written by men and frozen in time. It is not from a source outside myself. My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period."

"Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket."

"My mother's life was way too heavy for me."

"Nobody around here had ever seen a lady beekeeper till her. She liked to tell everybody that women made the best beekeepers, 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting. It comes from years of loving children and husbands."

"I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men."

"August: You know, somethings don't matter that much...like the color of a house...But lifting a person's heart--now that matters. The whole problem with people--'Lily: They don't know what matters and what doesn't...August:...They know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is to choose what matters."

"I think there must be a place inside of us where dreams go and wait their turn."

"I can't explain that, except to say there's release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. You come finally to the irreducible thing, and there's nothing left to do but pick it up and hold it. Then, at least, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance."

"I said out loud, 'Damn you for saving yourself. How come you left me with nothing but to love you and hate you, and that's gonna kill me, and you know it is.'Then I turned round, went back to the cellar room, and picked up the sewing.Don't think she wasn't in every stitch I worked. She was in the wind and the rain and the creaking from the rocker. She sat on the wall with the birds and stared at me. When darkness fell, she fell with it."

"People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different."

"There would be no grand absolution, only forgiveness meter out in these precious sips. I would well up from Hugh's heart in spoonfuls, and he would feed it to me. And it would be enough."

"Nothing is fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now."

"I can't think of anything I'd rather have more than somebody lovin' me."

"Probably one or two moments in your whole life you will hear a dark whispering spirit, a voice coming from the center of things. It will have blades for lips and will not stop until it speaks the one secret thing at the heart of it all. Kneeling on the floor, unable to stop shuddering, I heard it plainly. It said, You are unlovable..."

"I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it."

"There's release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. You come finally to the irreducible thing, and there's nothing left to do but pick it up and hold it. Then, at last, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance."

"I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was."

"Every living creature on the earth is special. You want to be the one that puts an end to one of them?"

"Don't be telling me--can't be done. That's some god damney white talk, that's what that is."

"From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac."

"Actually, you can be bad at something...but if you love doing it, that will be enough. - August Boatwright."

"Mr. Vesey, though, he didn't like any kind of talk about heaven. He said that was the coward's way, pining for life in the hereafter, acting like this one didn't mean a thing. I had to side with him on that."

"I read usually in the morning, in my kitchen at breakfast - a short reading time, usually poetry. I read in bed every night. I usually get in bed pretty early with a book, and I read until I can't prop my eyes open anymore - sometimes rather late."

"The words were unexpected, but so incisively true. So much of prayer is like that - an encounter with a truth that has sunk to the bottom of the heart, that wants to be found, wants to be spoken, wants to be elevated into the realm of sacredness."

"You forgive what you can, when you can. That's all you can do.To forgive does not mean overlooking the offense and pretending it never happened. Forgiveness means releasing our rage and our need to retaliate, no longer dwelling on the offense, the offender, and the suffering, and rising to a higher love. It is an act of letting go so that we ourselves can go on."

"I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It's a strange truth, but forgiveness is a painful and difficult process. It's not something that happens overnight. It's an evolution of the heart."