"He'd gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. It seemed like this should tell God something."
"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."
"It takes so much energy to keep things at bay."
"People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different."
"Nobody around here had ever seen a lady beekeeper till her. She liked to tell everybody that women made the best beekeepers, 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting. It comes from years of loving children and husbands."
"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"
"I don't remember what they said, only the fury of their words, how the air turned raw and full of welts. Later it would remind me of birds trapped inside a closed room, flinging themselves against the windows and the walls, against each other."
"Depressed people do things they wouldn't ordinarily do."
"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."
"August: You know, somethings don't matter that much...like the color of a house...But lifting a person's heart--now that matters. The whole problem with people--"Lily: They don't know what matters and what doesn't...August:...They know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is to choose what matters."
"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."
"Have you ever noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get?"
"As I squatted on the grass at the edge of the woods, the pee felt hot between my legs. I watched in puddle in the dirt, the smell of it rising into the night. There was no difference between my piss and June's. That's what i thought when I looked at the dark circle on the ground. Piss is Piss."
"My mother's life was way too heavy for me."
"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 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."
"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."
"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?"
"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 it speaks the one secret thing at the heart of it all. Kneeling on the floor, unable to stop shuddering, I heard it plainly. It said, You are unlovable..."
"I can't think of anything I'd rather have more than somebody lovin' me."
"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 onto my side.'There is nothing perfect,' August said from the doorway. 'There is only life."
"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."