“But who has time to write memoirs? I’m still living my memoirs.”

“When the Deep Purple falls,Over sleepy garden walls, And the stars begin to flicker in the sky,Thru the mist of a memoryYou wander back to me,Breathing my name with a sigh.In the still of the night,Once again I hold you tight, Tho' you're gone, your love lives onWhen moonlight beams.And as long as my heart will beatLover, we'll always meetHere in my Deep Purple dreams.”

“She walks barefoot into the humid night, moonlight on her freckled shoulders. Near a huge, live oak tree on the edge of her father's cotton fields, Sidda looks up into the sky. In the crook of the crescent moon sits the Holy Lady, with strong muscles and a merciful heart. She kicks her splendid legs like the moon is her swing and the sky, her front porch. She waves down at Sidda like she has just spotted an old buddy.Sidda stands in the moonlight and lets the Blessed Mother love every hair on her six-year-old head. Tenderness flows down from the moon and up from the earth. For one fleeting, luminous moment, Sidda Walker knows there has never been a time when she has not been loved.”

“I wish I knew then what I know now - and still had those thighs!”

“Once the scent caught me on the street in Greenwich Village. I stopped in my tracks and looked around. Where was it coming from? A shop? The trees? A passerby? I could not tell. I only knew the smell made me cry. I stood on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village as people brushed by, and felt suddenly young and terribly open, as if I were waiting for something. I live in an ocean of smell, and the ocean is my mother.”

“I live in an ocean of smell…”

“I have been to the edge and lived to tell the tale..”