And I was struck all at once how life was out there going through its regular courses, and I was suspended, waiting, caught in a terrible crevice between living my life and not living it.

You got to figure out which end of the needle you’re gon be, the one that’s fastened to the thread or the end that pierces the cloth.

I believe in the goodness of imagination.

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

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.

Have you ever written a letter you knew you could never mail but you needed to write it anyway?

Loss takes up inside of everything sooner or later and eats right through it.

Sometimes I didn't even feel like getting out of bed. I took to wearing my days-of-the-week panties out of order. It could be Monday and I'd have on underwear saying Thursday. I just didn't care.

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

Regrets don't help anything.

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.

This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away.

Yes, here I am returning, the woman who bore herself to the bottom and back. Who wanted to swim like dolphins, leaping waves and diving. Who wanted only to belong to herself.

You can't stop your heart from loving, really -- it's like standing out there in the ocean yelling at the waves to stop.

So few people know what they're capable of.

Did you know there are thirty-two names for love in one of the Eskimo languages?" August said. "And we just have this one. We are so limited, you have to use the same word.

The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-com, and you never will outpace your grief.

We walked along the river with the words streaming behind us like ribbons in the night.

It was the in-between time, before day leaves and night comes, a time I’ve never been partial to because of the sadness that lingers in the space between going and coming.

When mauma saw my raw eyes, she said, “Ain’t nobody can write down in a book what you worth.

Gazing into the mirror, I saw myself as I was-a black silhouette in the room, a woman whose darkness had completely leaked through.

I wished she'd been smart enough, or loving enough, to realize everybody has burdens that crush them, only they don't give up their children.

The whole problem with people is they don't know what matters and what doesn't.

You know, some things don't matter that much...Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart - now, that matters.

That's what I told myself five hundred times: impossibility. I can tell you this much: the word is a great big log thrown on the fires of love. ~Page 133.

I realize what a strange in-between place I am in. The Young Woman inside has turned to go, but the Old Woman has not shown up.

I felt amazed at the choosing one had to do, over and over a million times daily--choosing love, then choosing it again...how loving and being in love could be so different.

We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.

If you don't know where your're going, you should know where you came from.

The redness had seeped from the day and night was arranging herself around us. Cooling things down, staining and dyeing the evening purple and blue black.

For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the place of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging.

I’d chosen the regret I could live with best, that’s all.

When a woman starts to disentangle herself from patriarchy, ultimately she is abandoned to her own self.

Standing there, I loved myself and I hated myself. That's what the black Mary did to me, made me feel my glory and my shame at the same time.

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.

I wondered what it was like to be inside her, just a curl of flesh swimming in the darkness, the quiet things that had passed between us.

She didn't even know how dangerous the truth could be, all the tiny, shattering seeds it carried.

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.

Everybody needs a seashell in her bathroom to remind her the ocean is her home.

It takes a bee 10,000,000 trips to collect enough nectar to make 1 pound of honey.

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

Shitbucket, hellfire, damnation, and son of a mother bitch," said Rosaleen, laying into each word like it was sweet potatoes on her tongue.

There is a fullness of time for things. You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet. When to let things take their course.

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.

I didn't know how to be in the world without her.

There's a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it.

Every living creature on the earth is special. You want to be the one that puts an end to one of them?

Into every life a little rain must fall.

How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.

Make the world better. Take the meanness out of people's hearts.