The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-come, and you never will outpace your grief.
The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.
The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them. I was wondering what my body knew that I didn't.
It was the first time I'd ever said the words to another person, and the sound of them broke open my heart.
In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional...What a special case I was.
If everyone was so keen to Christianize the slaves, why weren’t they taught to read the Bible for themselves?
I'll write this all down for you, I said. I'll put it in a story. I don't know if that's what he wanted to ask me, but it's something everybody wants--for someone to see the hurt done to them and set...
I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?
I marveled at how mixed up people got when it came to love. I myself, for instance. It seemed like I was now thinking of Zach forty minutes out of every hour, Zach, who was an impossibility. That's wh...
How can you ask us to go back to our parlors? I said, rising to my feet. To turn our backs on ourselves and on our own sex? We don’t wish the movement to split, of course we don’t—it saddens me to thi...
Honeybees depend not only on physical contact with the colony, but also require it's social companionship and support. Isolate a honeybee from her sisters and she will soon die.
For always, always, we are waking up and then waking up some more.
Depressed people do things they wouldn't ordinarily do.
Anyone can retire into a quiet place, wrote Evelyn Underhill, but it's the shutting of the door that makes the difference. Solitude is a time for stripping away everything in order to focus on God. (M...
And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love.
Gradually it occurred to me that we spend a great deal of life asleep and that dreams are little narratives, little stories. I thought, 'Who's choreographing this stuff?'
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
You do your rebellions any way you can.
Where had I been that I didn't know about imaginary friends? I could see the point of it. How a lost part of yourself steps out and remind you who you could be with a little work.
When you're unsure of yourself, she said, when you start pulling back into doubt and small living, she's the one inside saying, 'Get up from there and live like the glorious girl you are.' She's the p...