He never said "Don't tell your mama." He never had to say it. I did not know how to tell anyone what I felt, what scared me and shamed me... (109)

It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.

Don't go taking that gospel stuff seriously. It's nice to clean you out now and then, but it ain't for real. It's like bad whiskey. Run through you fast and leave you with pain.

The worst thing in the world was the way I felt when I wanted us to be like the families in the books in the library, when I just wanted Daddy Glen to love me like the father in Robinson Crusoe. (209)

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different..." from Two or Three Things i Know For Sure

Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.

I was born in 1949, and by the time I was 10, I figured out that my hope chest was not aimed in the same direction everybody else's was. And that life was going to be very, very complicated. And that I could either be provocative and declamatory, or shy, retiring and scared.