Quotes from book

The Secret Life of Bees

“There is nothing perfect. There is only life.”

“What's wrong with living in a dream world? You have to wake up.”

“You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside”

“It's something everybody wants-for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.”

“You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair…”

“In the photograph by my bed my mother is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again.”

“I'll write this all down for you," I said. "I'll put it in a story." I don't know if that's what he wanted to ask me, but it's something everybody wants--for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.”

“This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away.”

“I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?”

“I wished she'd been smart enough, or loving enough, to realize everybody has burdens that crush them, only they don't give up their children.”

“After you get stung, you can't get unstung
no matter how much you whine about it.”

“You gotta imagine what's never been.”

“women made the best beekeepers 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting.”

“And I was struck all at once how life was out there going through its regular courses, and I was suspended, waiting, caught in a terrible crevice between living my life and not living it.”

“There is a fullness of time for things. You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet. When to let things take their course.”

“You don't have to place your hand on Mary's heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and all the other things we need to get through life. You can place it right here on your own heart. Your own heart.”

“Sunset is the saddest light there is.”

“Loss takes up inside of everything sooner or later and eats right through it.”

“Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.”