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

She was too busy feeling grief to dress like grief.

She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.

If you’re silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

You heard me. You ain’t blind.

I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.

Tea Cake, the son of the Evening Sun, had to die for loving her.

Truth is a letter from courage!

Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.

She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

An envious heart makes a treacherous ear.

Love is like the sea. It’s a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.

There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man’s spice-box seasons his own food.

So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day.

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.

I don’t know any more about the future than you do. I hope that it will be full of work, because I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find. I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death.

As we speak I’m at peace, no longer scared to die.

What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.

Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence.

I do not believe in my death.

On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death.

Most states in the union where the death penalty is theoretically on the books don’t have executions.

You may be gone but you’re never over.

If a man should wanton walk with crime, he shall find in death no great deliverance.