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?
If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.
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.
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 know it.
Actually, you can be bad at something…but if you love doing it, that will be enough. – August Boatwright
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 up and hold it. Then, at last, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance.
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 lives were a mess.
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 no need for striving and impatience and dashing about seeking approval.
He’d gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. It seemed like this should tell God something.
…he felt God the same way arthritic monks felt rain coming in their joints. He felt only a hint of him.
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.
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.
People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.
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 authority.
…Mary, fresh with feminist appropriations, has the potential to undergird women’s reformations.
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 your own heart. Your own heart.
Nothing is fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now
How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.
Depressed people do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do.
There would be no grand absolution, only forgiveness meter out in these precious sips. I would well up from Hugh’s heart in spoonfuls, and he would feed it to me. And it would be enough.
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 have to wake up and forgive us again.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe one reason I had avoided anger was that like a lot of people I had thought there were only two responses to anger: to deny it or to strike out thoughtlessly. But other responses are possible.
Have you ever noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get?
From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.
When is the impulse to help an adult child a wise intervention and when is it self-serving and prying? I have an uneasy feeling I will have to carry the question around for a while like some grating pebble in my shoe.
I was wishing I had a story like that one to live inside me with so much loudness you could pick it up on a stethoscope.
You can go other places, all right – you can live on the other side of the world, but you can’t ever leave home
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 to side with him on that.
Don’t be telling me–can’t be done. That’s some god damney white talk, that’s what that is.
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. (Matt 6:6)
Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.
Up until then I’d thought that white people and colored people getting alone was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan.
I’d chosen the regret I could live with best, that’s all. I’d chosen the life I belonged to.
It occurred to them for the first time in their lives that what’s divine can come in dark skin.
Every living creature on the earth is special. You want to be the one that puts an end to one of them?
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.
To condemn slavery was one thing—that I could do in my own individual heart—but female ministers!
You’re looking for a reason,” she said. “And that doesn’t help. It doesn’t change the present.
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.
I can’t think of anything I’d rather have more than somebody lovin’ me.
The basic dynamics of conversion are summed up for me in the words LEAVE-ARRIVE, END-BEGIN, SHED-EMERGE. These are the tensions of conversion and spiritual awakening.
I have come here not to find answers, but to find a way to live in a world without any.
It shocks me how I wish for…what is lost and cannot come back.
I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was.
The whole problem with people is they know what matters but they don’t choose it. ~Secret Lives of Bees
You’ve been halfway living your life for too long. May was saying that when it’s time to die, go ahead and die, and when it’s time to live, live. Don’t sort-of-maybe live, but live like you’re going all out, like you’re not afraid.
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 Source.
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.
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 think there must be a place inside of us where dreams go and wait their turn.
I can’t explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me.
I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It’s a strange truth, but forgiveness is a painful and difficult process. It’s not something that happens overnight. It’s an evolution of the heart.
I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It’s a strange truth, but forgiveness is a painful and difficult process.
We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way.