Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You can't stop your heart from loving, really -- it's like standing out there in the ocean yelling at the waves to stop.
Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.
Once you know the truth, you can’t ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.
Sometimes you want to fall on your knees and thank God in heaven for all the poor news reporting that goes on in the world.
I've always been a journal-keeper. I've always tried to write about how I'm experiencing life, and my feelings and thoughts.
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.
How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.
How did we ever get the idea that God would supply us on demand with quick fixes, that God is merely a rescuer and not a midwife?
Gender and race got very entwined in the 19th century, as abolition broke out, and then women wanted the right to speak about it.
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.
Gazing into the mirror, I saw myself as I was-a black silhouette in the room, a woman whose darkness had completely leaked through.
'Traveling with Pomegranates' is a very personal, very honest story about my relationship with my daughter and Ann's with her mother.
The True Self is not our creation, but God's. It is the self we are in our depths. It is our capacity for divinity and transcendence.
When compassion wakes up in us, we find ourselves more willing to become vulnerable, to take the risk of entering the pain of others.
Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier.
It's always been my hope that I would write a story that would inspire and would connect with people in a way that would touch hearts.
On weekends, I sit in a lounge chair on my balcony. I love to be outside when the weather's right. I can stay there pretty much all day.
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.
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.
You've 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 could even feel how perishable all my moments really were, how all my life they had come to me begging to be lived, to be cherished even.
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.
I was a very good nurse, but I burned out after eight years or so because it wasn't what I truly wanted to do. Writing is what I belong to.
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
I realize that I can be with someone, but on a deeper level I'm not available to them at all. I have attention deficit disorder of the soul.
Most people don't have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don't know anything about.
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.
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.
I actually grew up in a house in which bees lived in one of the walls, and they lived there 18 years, in fact, so it wasn't a fleeting thing.
I want my words to open a portal through which the reader may leave the self, migrate to some other human sky and return 'disposed' to otherness.
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.
I feel like we need to be aware of the ways we use and misuse religious dogma: whether it takes us deeper into love and inclusion or it separates us.
I eventually found that the soul is more than an immortal commodity to win and save. It is the repository of the inner divine, the truest part of us.
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.
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 think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
One day I will have to forgive life for ending, I tell myself. I will have to learn how to let life be life with its unbearable finality ... just be what it is.
So I taught Sunday school and brought dishes to all manner of potlucks and tried to adjust the things I heard from the pulpit to my increasingly incongruent faith.
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?
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?
Grandmotherhood initiated me into a world of play, where all things became fresh, alive, and honest again through my grandchildren's eyes. Mostly, it retaught me love.
Stories are amazing and powerful because they can resonate with people depending on their needs and experiences and speak truths we need to hear in that moment in time.
Gradually it occurred to me that we spend a great deal of life asleep and that dreams are little narratives, little stories. I thought, 'Who's choreographing this stuff?'
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.
Were all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren't we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we'll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that's all.