“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don'

Not only the Klan: the White Citizens Councils, and the John Birch Society, and representatives of the people so powerful they were untouchable, like Senator Eastland, for example. White people had embraced and endured this slaughter for generations, and appeared more than willing to perpetuate it for generations to come. It was, when you thought about it, as weird and dreadful as those pictures of penitentes howling through the streets, or the wilderness, beating themselves with whips, scouring themselves with thorns-  how deeply, how relentlessly, they despised themselves!"

I know a lot of people in this country say that you work yourself up by your bootstraps. That's a little Marie Antoinette telling people to eat cake. That's what she did, when there weren't no bread in the palace. You can't talk about bootstraps unless you got boots, and, Lord knows, we didn't have no boots. I got bunions on the soles of my feet, but I ain't got no corns on my toes. Me and boots were strangers- I still feel funny when I put on shoes

So then, for the first time, I wondered about love and wondered if I would find in myself the strength to love, and to take it: to accept my nakedness as sacred, and to hold sacred the nakedness of another. For, without love, pleasure's inventions are soon exhausted. There must be a soul within the body you are holding, a soul which you are striving to meet, a soul which is striving to meet yours

“I had discovered that my infirmity might not be my doom: my infirmity, or infirmities, might be forged into weapons. “

I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn't work that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male rage, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome. Sometimes, when the ceiling seems especially low and the past especially close, I think to myself, I did not make it out. I am still there in that place of diminishment, where that voice an octave deeper than mine is telling me what I am. Before I turned thirteen, I had never been part of a class that my father called empty-headed and addressed as "dollface", that our church seemed to see as just bodies. I was simply myself, unique and irreducible. Suddenly I became female, and it was as if a telescope I had been looking through- with a clear eye, up at an unbounded night of starts- had been viciously turned on me. I went to a pinpoint. Does God exist was never a question for me then; do I exist took up the whole of my mind. I did not make it out, but this does. Art goes outside, even if we don't; it fills the whole air, though we cannot raise our voices. This is the secret: we cannot raise our voices. This is the secret: when I encounter myself on the page, I am shocked at how forceful I seem. On the page I am strong, because that is where I put myself. I am no longer whispering through the small skirted shape of a keyhole: the door is knocked down and the roof is blown off and I am aimed once more at the entire wide night.

I am in the house of nouns here, and it fills me with the conviction that good books sometimes give: that life can be holdable in the hand, examined down to the dog hairs, eaten with the eyes and understood.

All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are a part of their we. A we is powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its shape.  You have belonged to many of them. So have I. The church was one of mine- it was my family. The story of a family is always a story of complicity. It's about not being able to chose the secrets you've been let in on. The question, for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other

Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they've become.

Consistency and an established worldview were excess baggage in the intellectual mobile warfare that flared up in the mass media's tiny time segments, and it was his great advantage to be free of such things. He had nothing to protect, which meant that he could concentrate all his attneiton on pure acts of combat. He only needed to attack, to knock his enemy down."

Diane visited her mother's grave while she was in D.C. What saddened her the most, she said, was that Carol's life had been so incomplete: a verb without an object, an anonymous letter, misunderstood for the want of a signature. 'I don't miss her as much as I miss what she might have been