It’d been Lucy who ran tattling to Miss Mary about my lettering under the tree, and Miss Mary had run tattling to missus. I’d judged Lucy to be stupid, but she was only weak-willed and wanting to get...
I thought of the girl who bathed in a copper tub. I thought of the woman who stole a bullet mold. I loved that girl, that woman.
How do we accomplish this matter of gathering life together in God? We must begin primarily by refocusing our attention keeping our minds and hearts directed toward God. The essence of the centered li...
I have knots in my years that I can`t undo, and this is one of the worst--the night I did wrong and Mauma got caught
I believe in the goodness of imagination.
You're looking for a reason, she said. And that doesn't help. It doesn't change the present.
When mauma saw my raw eyes, she said, Ain’t nobody can write down in a book what you worth.
To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.
People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's hard. If God said in plain language, I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die, a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.
People say love gets fouled by a difference big as ours. I didn’t know for sure whether Miss Sarah’s feelings came from love or guilt. I didn’t know whether mine came from love or a need to be safe. S...
People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.
One day i will have to forgive life for ending. I tell myself I will have to learn how to let life be life with its unbearable finality.....just be what ti is.
My aspiration to become a jurist had been laid to rest in the Graveyard of Failed Hopes, an all-female establishment. The sorrow of it had faded, but regret remained, and I’d taken to wondering if the...
It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.
It never occurred to her their gaiety wasn’t contentment, but survival.
If you aren't giving people something to talk about, you've become too dull.
I'm tired of carrying around the weight of the world. I'm just going to lay it down now. It's my time to die, and it's your time to live. Don't mess it up.
I sit in my new room and write everything down. My heart never stops talking.
I only know there's something unsettling about a door that closes forever. I feel a vague lament about the changing of my body, the alterations in my appearance, the bleeding out of motherhood, the fe...
I liked the way Walter Cronkite looked, with his black glasses and his voice that knew everything worth knowing. Here was a man who was not against books, that was plain. Take everything T. Ray was no...