guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.

The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love.

Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.

Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me

Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.

They encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations...