How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
That night I lay in bed and thought about dying and going to be with my mother in paradise. I would meet her saying, 'Mother, forgive. Please forgive,' and she would kiss my skin till it grew chapped and tell me I was not to blame. She would tell me this for the first ten thousand years (1.8).
We learn pretty quickly that Lily has some serious mama issues. She suffers from a lot of guilt regarding her role in her mom's death, and she seems to feel the void it created pretty acutely a decade later.
Quote #2
Then I turned around and looked back toward the door where I'd come in. Over in the corner was a carving of a woman nearly three feet tall. She was one of those figures that had leaned out from the front of a ship in olden times, so old she could have been on the Santa Maria with Columbus, for all I knew.
She was black as she could be, twisted like driftwood from being out in the weather, her face a map of all the storms and journeys she'd been through. Her right arm was raised, as if she was pointing the way, except her fingers were closed in a fist. It gave her a serious look, like she could straighten you out if necessary (4.29-30)
When Lily shows up at the Boatwrights, one of the first things she sees is this statue. She soon learns that this statue has a whole backstory and lore attached to it. It is the figurehead off an old ship that the slaves who discovered it deemed a representation of the Virgin Mary. Through her symbolic power, this "Mary" became a source of strength and resourcefulness to the slaves, and so the statue remains incredibly meaningful to August's family (who inherited her somehow). She was also the inspiration for the Mary who appears on August's honey jars.
Quote #3
If this was a man's world, a veil took the rough beard right off. Everything appeared softer, nicer. When I walked behind August in my bee veil, I felt like a moon floating behind a night cloud (5.73).
Bees and the moon are powerful symbols of femininity and maternity in the book, and this passage combines them both. As you can see, the veils involved in bee keeping help smooth out the edges of a "man's world."