You gotta imagine what's never been.

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.

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.

The only wrong thing, perhaps, is permanently hesitating on the verge of courage.

We can't think of changing our skin color. Change the world - that's how we gotta think.

This is the autumn of wonders, yet every day, every single day, I go back to that burned afternoon in August when T. Ray left. I go back to that one moment when I stood in the driveway with small rocks and clumps of dirt around my feet and looked back at the porch. And there they were. All these mothers. I have more mothers than any eight girls off the street. They are the moons shining over me.

I found that I could not climb my way up to God in a blaze of doing and performing. Rather, I had to descend into the depths of myself and find God there in the darkness of troubled waters.