And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love.

Loss takes up inside of everything sooner or later and eats right through it.

The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.

You forgive what you can, when you can. That's all you can do.To forgive does not mean overlooking the offense and pretending it never happened. Forgiveness means releasing our rage and our need to retaliate, no longer dwelling on the offense, the offender, and the suffering, and rising to a higher love. It is an act of letting go so that we ourselves can go on.

The True Self is not our creation, but God's. It is the self we are in our depths. It is our capacity for divinity and transcendence.

History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another's pain in the heart our own.

Where do you come from?"...This is the number one most-asked question in all of South Carolina. We want to know if you are one of us, if your cousin knows our cousin, if your little sister went to school with our big brother, if you go to the same Baptist church as our ex-boss. We are looking for ways our stories fit together.