When I was a child I read books for entertainment and information; I now think of books as lifeboats.

look in a man’s face” is a brazen thing to do. They look instead at his feet or his knees.

Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.

Naw, I say. Mr ____, can tell you, I don’t like it at all. What is it to like? He git up on you, heist your nightgown round your waist, plunge in. Most times I...

The crushed teapot in the rubbish of the bulldozed house will sing in your ears forever.

Here’s the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And...

When it is all too much; when the news is so bad meditation itself feels useless, and a single life feels too small a stone to offer on the altar of Peace, find a Human...

The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries (“museums”), and not yourselves, are full.

Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.

Expect nothing. Live frugallyOn surprise.become a strangerTo need of pityOr, if compassion be freelyGiven outTake only enoughStop short of urge to pleadThen purge away the need.Wish for nothing largerThan your own small heartOr greater than...

You think you can avoid [pain,] but you actually can’t. If you do, you just get sicker, or you feel more pain. But if you can speak it, if you can write it, if you...

I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is.

But it ain’t easy, trying to do without God even if you know he ain’t there, trying to do without him is a strain

I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.

Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never...

All her young life she has tried to please her father, never quite realizing that, as a girl, she never could.