Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.

In the photograph by my bed my mother 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.

At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt the longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam.

One day I will have to forgive life for ending, I tell myself. I will have to learn how to let life be life with its unbearable finality ... just be what it is.

That's what I told myself five hundred times: impossibility. I can tell you this much: the word is a great big log thrown on the fires of love. ~Page 133.

I vividly remember the summer of 1964 with its voter registration drives, boiling racial tensions, and the erupting awareness of the cruelty of racism. I was never the same after that summer.

You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home