“Everything that comes to us is a blessing or a test. That’s all you need to know in this life…just the certainty that God’s got His eye on you, that He knows what you are made of, what you need to grow on. Why,questioning’s a sin, it’s pointless. He will show you your path in His own good time. And long as I remember that, I’m fine.”

“I have lived my life in pursuit of the remade world...I believe in truth. I believe in truth denied any use of it can believe in it. I know its power. I know the threat it represents to a world constructed on lies.I know the myths of the family that thread through our society's literature, music, politics - and I know the reality. The reality is that for many of us family was as much the incubator of despair as the safe nurturing haven the myths promised... But I also believe in hope...The worst thing done to us in the name of a civilized society is to label the truth of our lives material outside the legitimate subject matter of serious writers...I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them. The only hope you have, the only hope any of us has, is the remade life.”

“Never give anyone the satisfaction of denying you something you need, and for that, what you have to do is to learn to need nothing. Starve the wanting part of you. Dorothy Allison, “Mama” Trash”

“I told her, Don't touch me that way. Don't come at me with that sour-cream smile. Come at me as if I were worth your life - the life we make together. Take me like a turtle whose shell must be cracked, whose heart is ice, who needs your heat. Love me like a warrior, sweat up to your earlobes and all your hope between your teeth. Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted.”

“When I finally let someone into my narrow bed, the first thing I told her was what I could not do. I said, "I can't fix it, girl. I can't fix anything. If you don't as me to fix it, you can ask anything else. If you can say what you need, I'll try to give it to you.”

“I am the woman who lost herself but now is found, the lesbian, outside the law of the church and man, the one who has to love herself or die. If you are not as strong as I am, what will be make together? I am all muscle and wounded desire, and I need to know how strong we both can be.”

“I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them.”