A longing for the extraordinary had grabbed ahold of her and was burning her up inside, so hot and fierce that her heart had gone stone cold toward everything and everybody standing in her way. That was Mama. Fire and ice.

Sometimes it's the toughest moments that you learn the most about yourself, and the more you know yourself, the less you are willing to give away.

If you look close enough, you can see cracks in everything. And that's okay. Because when you really think about it, it's the cracks and gaps and chinks in things that let the light shine in.

Our Human thinking brain operates by way of prediction, comparing new experiences to and constructing its perception from what is already believed to be true due to past experience. Without a mature intuition – thinking and feeling balanced and united—even groups trying to work together will only be capable of experiencing what has been going on in this sensory brain since about the 8th Century to the present.

If you can't laugh, you won't make it.

If we wear our worst reviews like a backpack, they travel with us.

Our political discourse has degenerated into anxieties about whether giving benefits to those people over there will take money out of the pockets of my kind of people over here, even when the changes are those from which we would all benefit.""The church is one of the few remaining institutions in the American scene that normalizes the effects of slavery, with most Christians preserving these segregated spaces in the interests of cultural comfort. Racially separate churches violate the interdependence that should characterize authentic Christian communities. Further, this individualism blocks churches from the blessings of gifts preserved in separate traditions. For example, segregated white churches celebrate the confessions and the rich legacies of the intellectual giants of the faith, but too often preach a weak and disembodied gospel that reduces spirituality to symbolism, and that separates material concerns from moral choices and the pursuit of righteousness.""Indeed, we have reached a sad state of affairs when we are all unwilling to be challenged when we go to church." "We should not move too quickly to a cheap reconciliation that forgets the past rather than honoring it as a clay vessel that contains a refined treasure bearing witness to the presence of Jesus at the margins. We need to make space for the histories of ethnic pain to be shared and revered among whites and all peoples of color, and to be instructed by them. That is, we need to understand how our past impinges on the present before we can move forward together toward our future. We cannot be who we are called to be unless we can gain access to the treasures of the gospel that have been preserved in the separate traditions of now segregated ethnic churches. We will not testify to the glory of God and the manifold riches of his mercy to the nations until we do.

When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to the university, where it was carefully taken out of him; and he was sent home like a well-threshed ear of corn, with nothing in his head.

I'm very caring with animals. I think patience is a big deal, because animals are always jumping around. I love to take care of people, so I think I'd be a good vet. I always wanted to be a vet when I was little.

The ultimate dream in life is to be able to do what you love and learn something from it.