There's a fullness of time for things, Lily. You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course.
There are things without explanation, moments when life will become arranged in such odd ways that you imagine a whole vocabulary of meaning inside them. The breakfast smell struck me like that.
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 u...
The queen, for the most part, is the unifying force of the community, if she removed from the hive, the workers very quickly sense her absence. After a few hours, or even less, they show unmistakable...
That's the sacred intent of life, of God--to move us continuously toward growth, toward recovering all that is lost and orphaned within us and restoring the divine image imprinted on our soul.
Strangest of all, it was the first time thoughts of equality had entered my head, and I could only attribute it to God, with whom I’d lately taken up and who was proving to be more insurrectionary tha...
Standing there, I loved myself and I hated myself. That's what the black Mary did to me, made me feel my glory and my shame at the same time.
Shitbucket, hellfire, damnation, and son of a mother bitch, said Rosaleen, laying into each word like it was sweet potatoes on her tongue.
She was with me the day I went to the paint store to pick out the color. I had a nice tan color in mind, but May latched on to this sample called Caribbean Pink. She said it made her feel like dancing...
She used to say, you got to figure out which end of the needle you’re gon be, the one that’s fastened to the thread or the end that pierces the cloth.
She loved me and pitied me. And I loved her and used her. It never was a simple thing. That day, our hearts were pure as they ever would get.
She liked to tell everyone that women make the best beekeepers, 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting.
She couldn’t get free and she couldn’t pop missus on the back of her head with a cane, but she could take her silk. You do your rebellions any way you can.
It was the in-between time, before day leaves and night comes, a time I’ve never been partial to because of the sadness that lingers in the space between going and coming.
It takes a bee 10,000,000 trips to collect enough nectar to make 1 pound of honey.
I wonder if that's the perennial story of writers: you find the true light, you lose the true light, you find it again. And maybe again.
I wished she'd been smart enough, or loving enough, to realize everybody has burdens that crush them, only they don't give up their children.
I longed for it in that excruciating way one has of romanticizing the life she didn’t choose.
I didn't see why loving someone had to have so much agony attached to it. It felt like a series of fresh cuts in the skin of my heart
Have you ever noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get?