Someone who thinks death is the scariest thing doesn't know a thing about life.
If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.
It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.
Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.
I have noticed that if you look carefully at people's eyes the first five seconds they look at you, the truth of their feelings will shine through for just an instant before it flickers away.
After you get stung, you can't get unstung no matter how much you whine about it.
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.
All my life I've thought I needed someone to complete me, now I know I need to belong to myself.
People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's that hard.
There is nothing perfect...only life.
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?
Sunset is the saddest light there is.
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.
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.
You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home
There's nothing like a song about lost love to remind you how everything precious can slip from the hinges where you've hung it so careful.
Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.
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.
You gotta imagine what's never been.
I can't think of anything I'd rather have more than somebody lovin' me.
It's your time to live, don't mess it up.
In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional...What a special case I was.
It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.
You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind.
I didn't know then what I wanted, but the ache for it was palpable.
The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them. I was wondering what my body knew that I didn't.
Nothing is fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now
Actually, you can be bad at something...but if you love doing it, that will be enough. - August Boatwright
History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another’s pain in the heart our own.
You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course.
It was the first time I'd ever said the words to another person, and the sound of them broke open my heart.
I know you've run away - everybody gets the urge to do that some time - but sooner or later you'll want to go home.
I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone's joy seemed to double it?
It's something everybody wants-for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.
You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair...
You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside
If you must err, do so on the side of audacity.
To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.
Honeybees depend not only on physical contact with the colony, but also require it's social companionship and support. Isolate a honeybee from her sisters and she will soon die.
We can't think of changing our skin color. Change the world - that's how we gotta think.
People in general would rather die than forgive. It's that hard. If God said in plain language. "I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die," a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.
It was the oldest sound there was. Souls flying away.
Women made the best beekeepers 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting.
I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?
My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it's the other way round.
If you aren't giving people something to talk about, you've become too dull.
What's wrong with living in a dream world? You have to wake up.
There's no pain on earth that doesn't crave a benevolent witness.
My mother's life was way too heavy for me.
I promise you, no one judges me more harshly than I do myself; I caused a brilliant wreckage. Some say I fell from grace; they’re being kind. I didn’t fall – I dove.
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.
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.
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.
Loss takes up inside of everything sooner or later and eats right through it.
Have you ever written a letter you knew you could never mail but you needed to write it anyway?
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.
You can't stop your heart from loving, really -- it's like standing out there in the ocean yelling at the waves to stop.
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.
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.
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.
The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-com, and you never will outpace your grief.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you don't know where your're going, you should know where you came from.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Make the world better. Take the meanness out of people's hearts.
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.
