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

I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don’t even...

In the photograph by my bed my other is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and...

I can’t think of anything I’d rather have more than somebody lovin’ me.

I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.

Mother seemed happiest when making and tending home, the sewing machine whistling and the Mixmaster whirling. Her deepest impulse was to nurture, to simply dwell; it had nothing to do with ambition and achievement in...

The whole problem with people is they know what matters but they don’t choose it. ~Secret Lives of Bees

If someone should ask me, ‘What does the soul do?’ I would say, It does two things. It loves. And it creates. Those are its primary acts.

…Mary, fresh with feminist appropriations, has the potential to undergird women’s reformations.

Actually, you can be bad at something…but if you love doing it, that will be enough. – August Boatwright

There are things without explanation, moments when life will become arranged in such odd ways that you imagine a whole vocabulary of meaning inside them. The breakfast smell struck me like that.

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.

My mother was a good Catholic — she went to mass twice a week at St. Mary’s in Richmond, but my father was an Orthodox Eclectic.

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....

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.