My writing is very organic. It's what I am. My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig. So I think of it as something that's very essential to my being.

Storytelling, you know, has a real function. The process of the storytelling is itself a healing process, partly because you have someone there who is taking the time to tell you a story that has great meaning to them. They're taking the time to do this because your life could use some help, but they don't want to come over and just give advice. They want to give it to you in a form that becomes inseparable from your whole self. That's what stories do. Stories differ from advice in that, once you get them, they become a fabric of your whole soul. That is why they heal you.

Helped are those who forgive; their reward shall be forgetfulness of every evil done to them. It will be in their power, therefore, to envision the new Earth. -----“The Gospel According to Shug

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one's people that has not previously been taken into account.

She thought of how precious it was to be able to know another person over many years. There was incomparable richness in it.

How anyone cannot see that Nature is God is amazing to me: that they'd rather worship something that can only exist, really, in their own minds.

I've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.