“It inspired a kind of Huck Finn moment when I decided it was better to risk hell than shrivel in the midst of a toxic Southern Baptist morality.”

“It all suddenly seemed like a hopeless fight, but so what? I told myself. What does it cost you to pretend that the can change (for the better)? That history is an arc and it bends toward justice, ...”

“I feel weird spilling it now but have to. Because after a while, it took root, the way shared stories do when you live with them long enough. They affect your DNA like radiation. They give birth to...”

“We Lesbian Avengers have built this shrine. It stands for our fear. It stands for our grief. It stands for our rage. And it enshrines our intention to live fully and completely as who we are, where...”

“I wanted to drag them all out, flay us all, destroy all the artificial separations of history. You'd merely done what I had, after all--split from two cells into four then eight then sixteen until ...”

“I begged Ana to shut them up, come out as Cuban, play the jail card. But she refused to claim that authority. 'It will mean you, as a Kentucky girl, have nothing valuable to say about Cuba. And Cub...”

“I think the highest forgiveness is to accept that creation is thoroughly tangled, with every possible quality given outlet for expression. People need to accept once and for all that there is only ...”

“You couldn't relive your life, skipping the awful parts, without losing what made it worthwhile. You had to accept it as a whole--like the world, or the person you loved.”

“Letting go doesn't mean that you don't care about someone anymore. It's just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself.”

“My parents' work ethic amazed me. How could they put in such long hours, day after day?Part of the reason was to keep the family going - to keep me going. I realized that, although we had different...”

“We were very different, and we disagreed about a lot of things, but he was always so interesting, you know?”

“We were more alike than any of the others, neither of us quite human and both hated by the two species we drifted between.”

“We have got some very big problems confronting us and let us not make any mistake about it, human history in the future is fraught with tragedy ... It's only through people making a stand against t...”

“Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts.”

“When we are surrounded by such diversity - in nature, in culture, in human spirit - how can we stand not to acknowledge it?”