I want to tell you I'm strong and resolute, but in truth, I feel afraid and alone and uncertain. I feel as if he has died, and I suppose in some way it's true. I'm left with nothing but this strange b...
I often went to Catholic mass or Eucharist at the Episcopal church, nourished by the symbol and power of this profound feeding ritual. It never occurred to me how odd it was that women, who have presi...
I felt someone should personally thank every rock out there for the human misery it had absorbed. We should kiss them one by one & say, we are sorry, but something strong & lasting had to do this for...
I don't remember what they said, only the fury of their words, how the air turned raw and full of welts. Later it would remind me of birds trapped inside a closed room, flinging themselves against the...
Everything she knew came from living on the scarce side of mercy.
Do not fear to lose what needs to be lost.
Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlive...
At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed...
As I squatted on the grass at the edge of the woods, the pee felt hot between my legs. I watched in puddle in the dirt, the smell of it rising into the night. There was no difference between my piss a...
After you get stung, you can't get unstungno matter how much you whine about it.
A slave was supposed to be like the Holy Ghost—don’t see it, don’t hear it, but it’s always hovering round on ready.
My awakening had shown me new truths about my religion, my life, and the lives of women. I had survived a landslide of awareness. But I didn't know if I could act on them. When you can't go forward an...
And whatever it is that keeps widening your heart that's Mary too not only the power inside you but the love. And when you get down to it Lily that's the only purpose grand enough for a human lif...
A lot of time you write out of some unconscious place. I try to trust what is coming and where it wants to take me.
The night fell over me, and for a moment I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin
You've been halfway living your life for too long. May was saying that 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 a...
You know, she's really just a figurehead off an old ship, but the people needed comfort and rescue, so when they looked at it, they saw Mary, and so the spirit of Mary took it over. Really, her spirit...
Women who bear the weight of opposition, she wrote, create a shelter for the rest of us.
We walked along the river with the words streaming behind us like ribbons in the night.
We can't think of changing our skin color. Change the world - that's how we gotta think.