You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger; love can even hold hatred.

Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman’s normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone I love not to mix with it.

I make a lot of expressions constantly. I’m animated.

I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox.

Whenever you’re in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.

If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.

I would go to the deeps a hundred times to cheer a downcast spirit. It is good for me to have been afflicted, that I might know how to speak a word in season to one that is weary.

Ultimately, who you choose to be in a relationship with and what you do in your bedroom is your business.

I remember my mother’s prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.

There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.

Love does not dominate; it cultivates.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

Jealousy… is a mental cancer.

Whether a person is straight or gay, Republican, Democrat, good person, not a good person, they’re all welcome, because to me, church is a place you’re supposed to get healed and whole and loved.

The most dangerous word in any human tongue is the word for brother. It’s inflammatory.

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand.

What air is to the body, to feel understood is to the heart.

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.

I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.

Pride is an independent, me-oriented spirit. It makes people arrogant, rude and hard to get along with. When our heart is prideful, we don’t give God the credit and we mistreat people, looking down on them and thinking we deserve what we have.

I am able to play monsters well. I understand monsters. I understand madmen.

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

‚Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird.

Many people mistake our work for our vocation. Our vocation is the love of Jesus.

Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.

One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.

Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.

I love America, it’s a much more permissive place.

The infinite faith I have in people’s ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior.

Country radio is much more like a family than any other group of people that I’ve met.

The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but the Pope has the duty, in Christ’s name, to remind the rich to help the poor, to respect them, to promote them.

In God’s family, there are no outsiders, no enemies.

In the stillness of your presence, you can feel your own formless and timeless reality as the unmanifested life that animates your physical form. You can then feel the same life deep within every other human and every other creature. You look beyond the veil of form and separation. This is the realization of oneness. This is love.

Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.

For years my wedding ring has done its job. It has led me not into temptation. It has reminded my husband numerous times at parties that it’s time to go home. It has been a source of relief to a dinner companion. It has been a status symbol in the maternity ward.

There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

Death surrenders us totally to God: it makes us enter into him; we must, in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandonment since, when death comes, all we can do is to surrender ourselves completely to the domination and guidance of God.

Even when a person has all of life’s comforts – good food, good shelter, a companion – he or she can still become unhappy when encountering a tragic situation.

Now that I’m a parent, I understand why my father was in a bad mood a lot.

Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia – to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.

It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

Rightly defined philosophy is simply the love of wisdom.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

It may be the part of a friend to rebuke a friend’s folly.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

I think what motivates people is not great hate, but great love for other people.

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

Mad or glad, Mr. Reagan is head over heels in love with Mrs. Reagan and can’t even imagine a world without her – He loves her.

There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in – that we do it to God, to Christ, and that’s why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.

It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature’s gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.

My family is very good about visiting me, and other friends as well.