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People who think dying is the worst thing don’t know a thing about life.
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.
Had my mother been there and bought this picture? I always promised myself one day, when I was grown-up enough, I would take the bus over there. I wanted to go everyplace she had ever been.
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.
Loss takes up inside of everything sooner or later and eats right through it.
Honeybees are social insects and live in colonies. Each colony is a family unit, comprising a single, egg-laying female or queen and her many sterile daughters called workers. The workers cooperate in the food-gathering, nest-building and rearing the offspring. Males are reared only at the times of year when their presence is required.
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.
Place a beehive on my grave and let the honey soak through. When I’m dead and gone, that’s what I want from you. The streets of heaven are gold and sunny, but I’ll stick with my plot and a pot of honey. Place a beehive on my grave and let the honey soak through.
Did this mean if I told May about T. Ray’s mounds of grits, his dozens of small cruelties, about my killing my mother—that hearing it, she would feel everything I did? I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone’s joy seemed to double it?
How could I live the whole rest of my life knowing these things? What could I ever do that would be good enough to make them go away? How come we couldn’t go back and fix the bad things we did?
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. But that’s just my opinion.
“Aristaeus was the first keeper of bees. One day all his bees died, punishment by the gods for something bad that Aristaeus had done. The gods told him to sacrifice a bull to show he was sorry, and then return to the carcass in nine days and look inside it. Well, Aristaeus did just what they said, and when he came back, he saw a swarm of bees fly out of the dead bull. His own bees, reborn. He took them home to his hives, and after that people believed that bees had power over death. The kings in Greece made their tombs in the shape of beehives for that very reason.”
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, Lily Owens. Unlovable. Who could love you? Who in this world could ever love you?
You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind.
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.
“There is nothing perfect,” August said from the doorway. “There is only life.”
People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It’s that hard. If God said in plain language, “I’m giving you a choice, forgive or die,” a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.
