1. “But I will tell you this secret thing, which not one of them saw, not even August, the thing that brought me the most cause for gladness. It was how Sugar-Girl said what she did, like I was truly one of them. Not one person in the room said, ‘Sugar-Girl, really, talking about white people like that and we have a white person present.’ They didn’t even think of me being different.”
2. “There is nothing perfect,’ August said from the doorway. ‘There is only life.”
3. “I sit in my new room and write everything down. My heart never stops talking.”
4. “I know you’ve run away – everybody gets the urge to do that some time – but sooner or later you’ll want to go home.”
5. “Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.”
6. “Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?”
7. “August said, “You know what? You think too much. It would do you a world of good to stop thinking and just go with your feelings once in a blue moon.”
8. “Looking back on it now, I want to say the bees were sent to me. I want to say they showed up like the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary, setting events in motion I could never have guessed.”
9. “We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn’t that a shame we don’t have many more ways to say it?”
10. “…impossibility. I can tell you this much: the word is a great big log thrown on the fires of love.”
11. “You just don’t interrupt somebody’s mourning with your own problems.”
12. “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.”
13. “People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.”
14. ″‘Good riddance,’ he said, and moved toward the door. We had to open up our little wall of women to let him through.”
15. “In the photograph by my bed my mother is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again.”
16. “Regrets don’t help anything.”
17. “You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course.”
18. “Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long.”
19. “You don’t have to put your hand on Mary’s heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and the other things we need to get through life,” she said. “You can place it right here on your own heart. Your own heart.”
20. “People who think dying is the worst thing don’t know a thing about life.”
21. “since for all I knew, people might come back one day as the very thing they killed.”
22. “I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.”
23. “It was the oldest sound there was. Souls flying away.”
24. “What’s wrong with living in a dream world? You have to wake up.”
25. “Looking at her eyes, I could see a fire inside them. It was a hearth fire you could depend on, you could draw up to and get warm by if you were cold or cook something on that would feed the emptiness in you.”
26. “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.”
27. “I live in a hive of darkness, and you are my mother, I told her. You are the mother of thousands.”
28. “There’s nothing like a song about lost love to remind you how everything precious can slip from hinges where you’ve hung it so careful.”
29. “Did you know there are 32 names for love in one of the Eskimo language? And we just have this one. We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn’t that a shame we don’t have more ways to say it.”
30. “He will use the word “love”, and the world will not stop spinning but go right on in its courses, like the river, like the bees, like everything.”
31. “If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you.”
32. “Sunset is the saddest light there is.”
33. “The month of August had turned into a griddle where the days just lay there and sizzled.”
34. “Or maybe desire kicked in when it pleased without noticing the rules we lived and died by.”
35. “The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.”
36. “Everybody needs a seashell in her bathroom to remind her the ocean is her home.”
37. “Everything I did felt heavy and difficult—drying the dishes, kneeling for evening prayers, even pulling down the sheets to get into bed.”
38. “Sometimes you want to fall on your knees and thank God in heaven for all the poor news reporting that goes on in the world.”
39. “I felt someone should personally thank every rock out there for the human misery it had absorbed. We should kiss them one by one & say, we are sorry, but something strong & lasting had to do this for May, & you are the chosen ones. God bless your rock hearts.”
40. “It takes so much energy to keep things at bay.”
41. “There is a fullness of time for things. You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet. When to let things take their course.”
42. “Knowing can be a curse on a person’s life. I’d traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn’t know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can’t ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.”
43. “That night I lay in bed and thought about dying and going to be with my mother in paradise. I would meet her saying, ‘Mother, forgive. Please forgive,’ and she would kiss my skin till it grew chapped and tell me I was not to blame. She would tell me this for the first ten thousand years.”
44. “Putting black cloths on the hives is for us. I do it to remind us that life gives way into death, and then death turns around and gives way into life.”
45. “We are looking for ways our stories fit together.”
46. “women made the best beekeepers ’cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting.”
47. “Standing there, I loved myself and I hated myself. That’s what the black Mary did to me, made me feel my glory and my shame at the same time.”
48. ″. . . I looked around me, and it was like seeing everything through a train’s thick window. A blur passed before me. A moving wave of color. ‘I am not one of you,’ I thought.”
49. “We walked to the woods beside the pink house with her stories still pulled soft around our shoulders. I could feel them touching me in places, like an actual shawl.”
50. “If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.”
51. “He’d gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. It seemed like this should tell God something.”
52. “T. Ray said ‘Who do you think you are? Julias Shakespeare?’ The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare’s first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival.”
53. “You know, Lily, people can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.”
54. “There is nothing perfect, there is only life.”
55. “There’s a fullness of time for things, Lily. You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course.”
56. “We walked along the river with the words streaming behind us like ribbons in the night.”
57. “How one minute she was talking to you and the next she had slipped into a private world where she turned her thoughts over and over, digesting stuff most people would choke on. I wanted to say, Teach me how to do that. Teach me how to take all this in.”
58. “My mother’s life was way too heavy for me.”
59. ″‘We can’t think of changing our skin,’ he said. ‘Change the world—that’s how we gotta think.‘”
60. “Probably one or two moments in your whole life you will hear a dark whispering spirit, a voice coming from the center of things. It will have blades for lips and will not stop until it speaks the one secret thing at the heart of it all. Kneeling on the floor, unable to stop shuddering, I heard it plainly. It said, You are unlovable…”
61. “T. Ray did not think colored women were smart. Since I want to tell the whole truth, which means the worst parts, I thought they could be smart, but not as smart as me, me being white. Lying on the cot in the honey house, though, all I could think was August is so intelligent, so cultured, and I was surprised by this. That’s what let me know I had some prejudice buried inside me.”
62. “Some things were not possible in this world. Children did not have two parents who refused to love them. One, maybe, but for pity’s sake, not two.”
63. “. I was wishing I had a story like that one to live inside me with so much loudness you could pick it up on a stethoscope,”
64. “Someone who thinks death is the scariest thing doesn’t know a thing about life.”
65. “Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.”
66. “Turned on its side, the brick announced a happy bee family, no Ozzie, just Harriet and her ten thousand daughters.”
67. “After you get stung, you can’t get unstung no matter how much you whine about it.”
68. “I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don’t even know it.”
69. “It was foolish to think some things were beyond happening, even being attracted to Negroes. I’d honestly thought such a thing couldn’t happen, the way water could not run uphill or salt could not taste sweet. A law of nature. Maybe it was a simple matter of being attracted to what I couldn’t have.”
70. “Most people don’t have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don’t know anything about.”
71. “…women make 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.”
72. “The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them. I was wondering what my body knew that I didn’t”
73. “How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is. The”
74. “It was the first time I’d ever said the words to another person, and the sound of them broke open my heart.”
75. “I have noticed that if you look carefully at people’s eyes the first five seconds they look at you, the truth of their feelings will shine through for just an instant before it flickers away.”
76. “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.”
77. “It was possible to close your eyes and exit life without actually dying. You just had to faint.”
78. “The problem is they know what matters, but they don’t choose it.”
79. “June played with her eyes closed, as if May’s spirit getting into heaven depended solely on her. You have never heard such music, how it made us believe death was nothing but a doorway.”
80. “Every living creature on the earth is special. You want to be the one that puts an end to one of them?.”
81. “There was nothing I hated worse than clumps of whispering girls who got quiet when I passed. I started picking scabs off my body and, when I didn’t have any, gnawing the flesh around my fingernails until I was a bleeding wreck. I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being me.”
82. “You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind.”
83. “I didn’t know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only think I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through t something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.”
84. “In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional.”
85. “We can’t think about changing our skin… change the world, that’s how we gotta think.”
86. “Now and then sprays of rain flew over and misted our faces. Every time I refused to wipe away the wetness. It made the world seem so alive to me. I couldn’t help but envy the way a good storm got everyone’s attention.”
87. “The queen, for her part, is the unifying force of the community; if she is removed from the hive, the workers very quickly sense her absence. After a few hours, or even less, they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness. —Man and Insects”
88. “the night fell over me, and for a moment I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin”
89. “Have you ever written a letter you knew you could never mail but you needed to write it anyway?.”
90. “Please, Lily, you are insulting your fine intelligence. Do you have any idea how smart you are?”
91. “Good night,” I said, and rolled onto my side. “There is nothing perfect,” August said from the doorway. “There is only life.”
92. “Egg laying is the main thing, Lily. She’s the mother of every bee in the hive, and they all depend on her to keep it going. I don’t care what their job is—they know the queen is their mother. She’s the mother of thousands.”
93. “The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.”
94. “Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.”
95. “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.”
96. “Depressed people do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do.”
97. “The queen, for the most part, is the unifying force of the community, if she removed from the hive, the workers very quickly sense her absence. After a few hours, or even less, they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness.”
98. “I couldn’t help but envy the way a good storm got everyone’s attention.”
99. “I had never thought of it like that, and it gave me a shocked feeling, like maybe I had no idea what kind of world I was actually living in,”
100. “Actually, you can be bad at something, Lily, but if you love doing it, that will be enough.”
101. “Our mother said she was like Mary, with her heart on the outside of her chest.”
102. “The last thing I expected was to fall asleep, but when there’s a blow to the system, all the body wants to do is go to sleep and dream on it.”
103. “Look, I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn’t stick with your original idea of paradise? People’s lives were a mess.”
104. “Honeybees depend not only on physical contact with the colony, but also require it’s social companionship and support. Isolate a honeybee from her sisters and she will soon die.”
105. “Regrets don’t help anything, you know that.”
106. “You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside. … When you’re unsure of yourself, when you start pulling back into doubt and small living, she’s the one inside saying, “Get up from there and live like the glorious girl you are.” She’s the power inside you.”
107. “The whole problem with people is…they know what matters, but they don’t choose it.”
108. “She smiled at me. “I loved him enough,” she said. “I just loved my freedom more.”
109. “People who think dying is the is the worst thing don’t know a thing about life.”
110. “Have you noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get? While”
111. “When a bee flies, a soul will rise,”
112. “I helped Rosaleen some in the kitchen, but mostly I was free to lie around and write in my notebook. I wrote so many things from my heart that I used up all the pages.”
113. “I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.”
114. “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.”
115. “Every little thing wants to be loved.”
116. “Lily, I like you better than any girl I’ve ever known, but you have to understand, there are people who would kill boys like me for even looking at girls like you.”
117. “It’s something everybody wants-for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.”
118. “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.”
119. “You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair…”
120. “It takes a bee 10,000,000 trips to collect enough nectar to make 1 pound of honey.”
121. “I hadn’t been out to the hives before, so to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called ‘bee yard etiquette’. She reminded me that the world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don’t be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don’t be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don’t swat. Don’t even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates while whistling melts a bee’s temper. Act like you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.”
122. “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.”
123. “It’s funny how you forget the rules. She was not supposed to be inside here. Every time a rumor got going about a group of Negroes coming to worship with us on Sunday morning, the deacons stood locked-arms across the church stems to turn them away. We loved them in the Lord, Brother Gerald said, but they had their own places.”
124. “This was a great revelation—not that I was white but that it seemed like June might not want me here because of my skin color. I hadn’t known this was possible—to reject people for being white.”
125. “The secret of a good lie is don’t overly explain, and throw in one good detail.”
126. “This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away.”
127. “I don’t remember what they said, only the fury of their words, how the air turned raw and full of welts. Later it would remind me of birds trapped inside a closed room, flinging themselves against the windows and the walls, against each other.”
128. “When it’s time to die, go ahead and die, and when it’s time to live, live. Don’t sort-of-maybe live, but live like you’re going all out, like you’re not afraid.”
129. “It’s your time to live, don’t mess it up.”
130. “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.”
131. “She’s the mother of thousands.”
132. “Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.”
133. “It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.”
134. “Well if you have a queen and a group of independent-minded bees that split off from the rest of the hive and look for another place to live, then you’ve got a swarm.”
135. “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.”
136. “You don’t have to place your hand on Mary’s heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and all the other things we need to get through life. You can place it right here on your own heart. Your own heart.”
137. “Birds of a feather flock together”
138. “We ate till we were tired out from eating, which is the way people in South Carolina eat at family reunions.”
139. “You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair…”
