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1 " I would never be happy till I managed to separate God from religion...God was infinitely bigger than I had ever imagined, infinitely more mysterious, and infinitely more kind. He was not to be held inside culture or tradition, nor could he ever be fully understood by a finite mind. "
― Pamela Terry , The Sweet Taste of Muscadines
2 " What an effort she made to change me, and when it was clear those surface alterations would never occur, she began to mistake my solitary nature for sullenness, my laughter for mockery, my silence for a judgment I didn't start to feel until much later. "
3 " It’s never wise to wonder if you’d be friends with your family were you not bound together by blood. Like a waterlogged door that can never close properly again, once entertained, that question can permanently change things, making it easier for you to notice the faults and the foibles of the people you’re tied to for life. "
4 " See, it’s a dangerous thing to let people grow up believing they have all the answers. They close their minds and stop questioning. Nothing’s a mystery anymore. Nobody’s right but them. "
5 " I wasn’t taught to question when I was young. None of us were. We were told what to think, not how to think. I was led to believe I’d been born wrong. Nothing I could do about that, except pretend to be other than I was. That was the only way I could be accepted by society, the people I loved, "
6 " Time is a god we all must serve, enduring its vagaries the best we can, "
7 " If you’ve done all the good you can do,” he’d say, “just step aside and let fate take over. "
8 " The cloth from which I'd been cut was as wildly divergent from the one that had produced my mother and sister as satin was from tweed. "
9 " Some choose to ameliorate our past by painting the pages of history books with the concentrated colors of excuse and denial. "
10 " We were the dark bookends on either side of her fairy tale. "
11 " The touchstones that stand in our memory rarely match up to reality. They suffer from the distortion of time, with a tendency to become bigger and grander whenever we call them to mind. "
12 " This is just one of life's curveballs. We all get them if we live long enough. "
13 " They were extras in the movie of my life- a cameo here, a walk-on there- people who'd populated the scenes of my childhood but who'd lacked the dramatic flair to be remembered. "
14 " I understood now that it's possible to be living a lie even if you're not the one who told it. "
15 " The past often rides on the notes of a song, and as this one wove its way around the car and out into the open air, it carried with it all the carefree vacations we’d taken to our favorite Florida beach before the loss of our father changed everything. "
16 " It was as though we'd stepped right into the stories he'd told us. I could almost hear his voice on the wind. "
17 " Just because they're in the majority doesn't mean they're right. Once you realize that, you can hear your own soul a whole lot better. "
18 " Their soul connection to this island had not been guaranteed by birth, yet they'd recognized from the first moment they'd stepped out onto its rocks that they felt more at home here than anywhere else in the world. "
19 " But doubt welcomes questions, and questions are often the doorway to truth. "
20 " So much hurt in the world, and for so many years. All over who people love. "
