You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside.’ She held out her hand to me. ‘Give me your hand.’ I lifted...
You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song th...
When it's time to die, go ahead and die, and when it's time to live, live. Don't sort-of-maybe live, but live like you're going all out, like you're not afraid.
We walked to the woods beside the pink house with her stories still pulled soft around our shoulders. I could feel them touching me in places, like an actual shawl.
Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?
To be honest, I had been restless...The sensation would rise suddenly like freight from the ocean floor--the unexpected discontent of cows in their pasture. The constant chewing of all that cud.
There is nothing perfect...there is only life.
There is nothing perfect,' August said from the doorway. 'There is only life.
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.
The whole problem with people is...they know what matters, but they don't choose it.
The first week at August's was a consolation, a pure relief. The world will give you that once in a while, a brief time-out; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy...
Still everyone, including the abbot, had said that he was running away from his grief. They'd had no idea what they were talking about. He'd cradled his grief, almost to the point of loving it. For so...
Some things were not possible in this world. Children did not have two parents who refused to love them. One, maybe, but for pity's sake, not two.
She reminded me that the world was really one big bee yard, and the same rules worked fine in both places: Don't be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don't be an idiot; wear lon...
She had the look of someone who’d declared herself, and seeing it, my indignation collapsed and her mutinous bath turned into something else entirely. She’d immersed herself in forbidden privileges, y...
Regrets don't help anything.
Lily Owens: If your favorite color is blue, why did you paint the house pink? August Boatwright: [chuckles] That was May's doing. When we went to the paint shop, she latched on to a color called, Cari...
It's your time to live, don't mess it up.
It has come as a great revelation to me, I wrote her, that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it’s not fixed, the plight of...
I wondered what it was like to be inside her, just a curl of flesh swimming in the darkness, the quiet things that had passed between us.