Mama Day

She could walk through a lightning storm without being touched; grab a bolt of lightning in the palm of her hand; use the heat of lightning to start the kindling going under her medicine pot. She turned the moon into salve, the stars into swaddling cloth, and healed the wounds of every creature walking up on two or down on four.

Time is a funny thing. I was always puzzled with the way a single day could stretch itself out to the point of eternity in your mind, all while years melted down into the fraction of a second.

The right woman is the one you can live with, not the one in your head.

Home. It's being new and old all rolled into one. Measuring your new against old friends, old ways, old places, Knowing that as long as the old survives, you can keep changing as much as you want without the nightmare of waking up to a total stranger.

I was so busy enjoying the change in you, I didn't notice it in myself.

When you raise a god instead of a child, you're bound to be serving him for the rest of your days. Same thing holds when you marry a god.

She done mellowed plenty since this marriage. Soft around the edges without getting too soft at the center. You fear that sometimes for women, that they would just fold up and melt away. She'd seen it happen so much in her time, too much for her to head on into it without thinking. Yes, that one time when she was way, way young. But after that, looking at all the beating, the badgering, the shriveling away from a lack of true touching was enough to give her pause. Not that she mighta hooked up with one of those. And not that any man — even if he tried — coulda ever soaked up the best in her. But who needed to wake up each morning cussing the day just to be sure you still had your voice? A woman shouldn't have to fight her man to be what she was; he should be fighting that battle for her.

There's something hypocritical about a city that keeps half of its population underground half of the time; you can start believing that there's much more space than there really is -- to live, to work.

Cause everybody wants to be right in a world where there ain’t no right or wrong to be found. My side. He don’t listen to my side. Just like that chicken coop, everything’s got four sides: his side, her side, an outside, and an inside. All of it is the truth

I was someone, and there was always something to do with me.

She ain't gotta worry about going on to hell. Hell was right now. Daddy always said that folks misread the Bible. Couldn't be no punishment worse than having to live here on earth, he said.

I think the Lord sits high and looks low, Pearl. And sometimes he gotta look a little lower than other times.