You put his brain in a bird, the bird would fly backwards" -Secret Life of the Bees

You can't stop your heart from loving, really -- it's like standing out there in the ocean yelling at the waves to stop.

I wished she'd been smart enough, or loving enough, to realize everybody has burdens that crush them, only they don't give up their children.

I could even feel how perishable all my moments really were, how all my life they had come to me begging to be lived, to be cherished even.

In recent years my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions. I'd come to think of God in terms like Divine Reality, the Absolute, or the One who holds us in being. I do believe that God is beyond any form and image, but it has grown clear to me that I need an image in order to relate. I need an image in order to carry on an intimate conversation with what is so vast, amorphous, mysterious, and holy that it becomes ungraspable. I mean, really, how to you become intimate with Divine Reality? Or the Absolute?

some things don't matter much. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart--now, that matters. The whole problem with people is...they know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.

From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.