If you don't know where your're going, you should know where you came from.

We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.

I felt amazed at the choosing one had to do, over and over a million times daily--choosing love, then choosing it again...how loving and being in love could be so different.

I realize what a strange in-between place I am in. The Young Woman inside has turned to go, but the Old Woman has not shown up.

That's what I told myself five hundred times: impossibility. I can tell you this much: the word is a great big log thrown on the fires of love. ~Page 133.

You know, some things don't matter that 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 don't know what matters and what doesn't.

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.

Gazing into the mirror, I saw myself as I was-a black silhouette in the room, a woman whose darkness had completely leaked through.

When mauma saw my raw eyes, she said, “Ain’t nobody can write down in a book what you worth.

It was the in-between time, before day leaves and night comes, a time I’ve never been partial to because of the sadness that lingers in the space between going and coming.

We walked along the river with the words streaming behind us like ribbons in the night.

The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-com, and you never will outpace your grief.

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.

So few people know what they're capable of.

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

Yes, here I am returning, the woman who bore herself to the bottom and back. Who wanted to swim like dolphins, leaping waves and diving. Who wanted only to belong to herself.

This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away.

I'm tired of carrying around the weight of the world. I'm just going to lay it down now. It's my time to die, and it's your time to live. Don't mess it up.

Regrets don't help anything.

People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.

Sometimes I didn't even feel like getting out of bed. I took to wearing my days-of-the-week panties out of order. It could be Monday and I'd have on underwear saying Thursday. I just didn't care.

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

Have you ever written a letter you knew you could never mail but you needed to write it anyway?