This could be our revolution: to love what is plentiful as much as what's scarce.

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

Listen, God love everything you love - and a mess of stuff you don't. But more than anything else, God love admiration. You saying God vain? I ast. Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. What it do when it pissed off? I ast. Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.

We have elders who [are] misguided and wallowing around in troughs of money with the wrong sort. They're not really good elders for the youth to emulate. The youth rightly don't like them.

I think mothers and daughters are meant to give birth to each other, over and over; that is why our challenges to each other are so fierce; that is why, when love and trust have not been too badly blemished or destroyed, the teaching and learning one from the other is so indelible and bittersweet. We daughters must risk losing the only love we instinctively feel we can't live without in order to be who we are, and I am convinced this sends a message to our mothers to break their own chains, though they may be anchored in prehistory and attached to their own great grandmothers' hearts.

Any God I ever found in church, I brought in myself.

I'm not being disrespectful of the medium; it's just not as important as the work that I actually do [books].