One thing that became clear to me is that images of a divine mother are surprisingly important in the psychological wholeness of women, especially in the process of women taking up residence in their...
If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.
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.
Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing.
...The world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don't be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don't be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don...
The month of August had turned into a griddle where the days just lay there and sizzled.
I think there must be a place inside of us where dreams go and wait their turn.
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 d...
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 pro...
This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away.
You come from your mauma, you sleep in the bed with her till you're near twenty years grown, and you still don't know what haunches in the dark corners of her.
I have come here not to find answers, but to find a way to live in a world without any.
God is he whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.
There's nothing like a song about lost love to remind you how everything precious can slip through the hinges where you've hung it so careful.
I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was.
All my life, in nameless, indeterminate ways, I'd tried to complete my life with someone else--first my father, then Hugh, even Whit, and I didn't want that anymore. I wanted to belong to myself.
There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one night when I was ten years old. She said, Handful, your granny-mauma saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds...
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.
But secluding my experience during that early period was both cowardly and wise. Some things are too fragile, too vulnerable to bring into the public eye. Tender things with tiny roots tend to wither...
The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.