It takes a bee 10,000,000 trips to collect enough nectar to make 1 pound of honey.

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

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

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.

Nobody around here had ever seen a lady beekeeper till her. She liked to tell everybody that women made the best beekeepers, 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting. It comes from years of loving children and husbands.

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

Every living creature on the earth is special. You want to be the one that puts an end to one of them?