“She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”

I love myself when I am laughing. And then again when I am looking mean and impressive.

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.

The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.

Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.

Love, I find, is like singing.

She was saving up feelings for some man she had never seen.

When one is too old for love, one finds great comfort in good dinners.

There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing things for them.

If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other folks then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding.

She starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see.

Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person.

Her old thoughts were going to come in handy now, but new words would have to be made and said to fit them.

It was not death she feared. It was misunderstanding.

Mystery is the essence of divinity

I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.

Oh to be a pear tree – any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!

The pain grows within you only to end within you.

He may never slay a dragon but he will grow old with you begging for death to leave you alone.

Understand or die.

After your death, you will be what you were before your birth.

Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

Animals hear about death for the first time when they die.

If your eyes could speak what stories would it tell? Would it even be able to speak or would it end up choking on all the water?