There's a gap somehow between empathy and activism. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of 'soul force' - something that emanates from a deep truth inside of us and empowers us to act. Once you ide...
I'd chosen the regret I could live with best, that's all. I'd chosen the life I belonged to.
Stories are amazing and powerful because they can resonate with people depending on their needs and experiences and speak truths we need to hear in that moment in time.
The past week, Mother had denied her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and she’d taken it hard. Her market excursions were the acme of her days, and trying to commiserate, I'd s...
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.
I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injus...
Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing.
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...
Did this mean if I told May about T. Ray's mounds of grits, his dozens of small cruelties, about my killing my mother--that hearing it, she would feel everything I did? I wanted to know what happened...
We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves...
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 e...
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...
Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache fo...
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.
The whole problem with people is they know what matters but they don't choose it. ~Secret Lives of Bees
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 ridicul...
Women made the best beekeepers, cause they have a special ability in them to love creatures that sting.
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...
There is nothing perfect...only life.
People who think dying is the worst thing don’t know a thing about life.