The Secret Life of Bees

by Sue Monk Kidd

People who think dying is the worst thing don’t know a thing about life.

exhausted. It takes so much energy to keep things at bay.

Up until then I’d thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan.

I couldn’t understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us.

You just don’t interrupt somebody’s mourning with your own problems.

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.

Where had I been that I didn’t know about imaginary friends? I could see the point of it. How a lost part of yourself steps out and reminds you who you could be with a little work.

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?

I settled on getting raised from the dead, since a big part of me still felt dead as a doornail.

People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It’s that hard.

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.

“Regrets don’t help anything, you know that.”