“I worried so much about how i looked and whether i was doing things right, i felt half the time i was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.- Lily”

“There was nothing I hated worse than clumps of whispering girls who got quiet when I passed. I started picking scabs off my body and, when I didn't have any, gnawing the flesh around my fingernails until I was a bleeding wreck. I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being me.”

“I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.”

“I felt amazed at the choosing one had to do, over and over a million times daily--choosing love, then choosing it again...how loving and being in love could be so different.”

“In recent years my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions. I'd come to think of God in terms like Divine Reality, the Absolute, or the One who holds us in being. I do believe that God is beyond any form and image, but it has grown clear to me that I need an image in order to relate. I need an image in order to carry on an intimate conversation with what is so vast, amorphous, mysterious, and holy that it becomes ungraspable. I mean, really, how to you become intimate with Divine Reality? Or the Absolute?”

“Lily Owens: If your favorite color is blue, why did you paint the house pink? August Boatwright: [chuckles] That was May's doing. When we went to the paint shop, she latched on to a color called, "Caribbean Pink." She said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish Flamenco. I personally thought it was the tackiest color I had ever seen, but I figured if it could lift May's heart, it was good enough to live in. Lily Owens: That was awfully nice of you. August Boatwright: Well, I don't know. Some things in life, like the color of a house, don't really matter. But lifting someone's heart? Now, that matters.”

“I promise you, no one judges me more harshly than I do myself; I caused a brilliant wreckage. Some say I fell from grace; they’re being kind. I didn’t fall – I dove.”