I believe in the goodness of imagination.

all that paddling around in the alphabet soup of one's childhood, scooping up letters, hoping to arrange them into enlightening sentences that would explain why things had turned out the way they had. It evoked a certain mutiny in me.

The only way I have ever understood, broken free, emerged, healed, forgiven, flourished, and grown powerful is by asking the hardest questions and then living into the answers through opening up to my own terror and transmuting it into creativity. I have gotten nowhere by retreating into hand-me-down sureties or resisting the tensions that truth ignited.

When you can't go forward, and you can't go backward, and you can't stay where you are without killing off something deep and vital in yourself, you are on the edge of creation.

You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course.

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.

Did you know there are thirty-two names for love in one of the Eskimo languages?" August said. "And we just have this one. We are so limited, you have to use the same word.