It Ain't That You Get Religion. Religion

I Was Born In 1949, And By The Time I Was 10, I Figured Out That My Hope Chest Was Not Aimed In The Same Direction Everybody Else's Was. And That Life Was Going To Be Very, Very Complicated. And That I Could Either Be Provocative And Declamatory, Or Shy, Retiring And Scared.

Beauty Is A Hard Thing. Beauty Is A Mean Story. Beauty Is Slender Girls Who Die Young, Fine-featured Delicate Creatures About Whom Men Write Poems. Beauty, My First Girlfriend Said To Me, Is That Inner Quality Often Associated With Great Amounts Of Leisure Time. And I Loved Her For That.

... Suffering Does Not Ennoble. It Destroys. To Resist Destruction, Self-hatred, Or Lifelong Hopelessness, We Have To Throw Off The Conditioning Of Being Despised, The Fear Of Becoming The They That Is Talked About So Dismissively, To Refuse Lying Myths And Easy Moralities, To See Ourselves As Human, Flawed, And Extraordinary. All Of Us Extraordinary

I Am The Only One Who Can Tell The Story Of My Life And Say What It Means.

Delia Picked At The Raw Sores Of Her Conscience...drunk Or Sober, Delia Lived In The Small Town In Her Heart, Ignoring The World In Which All Her Love Had Turned To Grief.