People who think dying is the worst thing don’t know a thing about life.

To condemn slavery was one thing—that I could do in my own individual heart—but female ministers!

We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn’t that a shame we don’t have many more ways to say it?

You don’t have to place your hand on Mary’s heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and all the other things we need to get through life. You can place it right here on...

Don’t be telling me–can’t be done. That’s some god damney white talk, that’s what that is.

I can’t explain that, except to say there’s release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. You come finally to the irreducible thing, and there’s nothing left to do but pick it...

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.

It takes so much energy to keep things at bay.

The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee earth with its constant heartbeat of...

You come from your mauma, you sleep in the bed with her till you’re near twenty years grown, and you still don’t know what haunches in the dark corners of her.

If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.

Still everyone, including the abbot, had said that he was running away from his grief. They’d had no idea what they were talking about. He’d cradled his grief, almost to the point of loving it....

My mother’s life was way too heavy for me.

Look, I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn’t stick with your original idea of paradise? People’s...

From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.

But secluding my experience during that early period was both cowardly and wise. Some things are too fragile, too vulnerable to bring into the public eye. Tender things with tiny roots tend to wither in...

People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.

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...

The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.

Sarah shifted on the bench. I worried she was winding up to say something, that Sky would start humming now, that the fright spring-coiled inside me would break loose. Then I remembered the widow dress...

One thing that became clear to me is that images of a divine mother are surprisingly important in the psychological wholeness of women, especially in the process of women taking up residence in their own...

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 life is...

August: You know, somethings don’t matter that much…like the color of a house…But lifting a person’s heart–now that matters. The whole problem with people–“Lily: They don’t know what matters and what doesn’t…August:…They know what matters,...

Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing.

It was the time of year when migrating crows wheeled across the sky, thunderous flocks that moved like a single veil, and I heard them, out there in the wild chirruping air. Turing to the...

I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was.

People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It’s that hard.

I believe in the goodness of imagination.

Not setting the ‘proper and accepted’ religious example for them conjured up images of the bad mother, the worst mother. Yet wouldn’t the example of a mother being true to her journey, taking a stand...

we need not avoid our active lives, but simply bring to them a new vision and shift of gravity. for in the center we are rooted in god’s love. in such a place there is...

Mr. Vesey, though, he didn’t like any kind of talk about heaven. He said that was the coward’s way, pining for life in the hereafter, acting like this one didn’t mean a thing. I had...

I have come here not to find answers, but to find a way to live in a world without any.

The pear trees were bare, their limbs spread open like the viscera of a parasol. Stretching into the darkness beyond, the single houses, double houses, and villas were lined up in cramped, neat rows which...

This surprised me because it made me realize that what I sought was not outside myself. It was within me, already there, waiting. Awakening was really the act of remembering myself, remembering this deep Feminine...

There is nothing perfect…only life.

I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men.

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...

He’d gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. It seemed like this should tell God something.

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.

Every person on the face of the earth makes mistakes, Lily. Every last one. We’re all so human. Your mother made a terrible mistake, but she tried to fix it.”Good night,’ I said, and rolled...

Nothing is fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now

Angelina, I think of you as my friend, the dearest of friends, and it tortures me to go against you, but now is the time to stand with the slave. The time will come for...

It shocks me how I wish for…what is lost and cannot come back.

You forgive what you can, when you can. That’s all you can do.To forgive does not mean overlooking the offense and pretending it never happened. Forgiveness means releasing our rage and our need to retaliate,...

All my life, in nameless, indeterminate ways, I’d tried to complete my life with someone else–first my father, then Hugh, even Whit, and I didn’t want that anymore. I wanted to belong to myself.

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 for some...

You can go other places, all right – you can live on the other side of the world, but you can’t ever leave home

The awakening passed from simple recognition of my need for God at the center of my life, to a depth where the will is stirred And that is a deeper place by far. That is...

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,...

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