That was what gospel was meant to do - make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified.

Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.

Everything that comes to us is a blessing or a test. That’s all you need to know in this life…just the certainty that God’s got His eye on you, that He knows what you are made of, what you need to grow on. Why,questioning’s a sin, it’s pointless. He will show you your path in His own good time. And long as I remember that, I’m fine.

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 do not write about nice people. I am not nice people.

It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing what I thought literature should do - which was simply to push people into changing their ideas about the world, and to go further, to encourage us in the work of changing the world, to making it more just and more truly human.

I fell into shame like a suicide throws herself into a river. (253)