The Secret Life of Bees Quotes

July 1, 1964, I lay in bed waiting for the bees to show up, thinking of what Rosaleen had said when I told her about their nightly visitations.'Bees swarm before death,' she'd said (1.5).

I didn't know whether to be excited for her or worried. All people ever talked about after church were the Negroes and whether they'd get their civil rights. Who was winning—the white people's te...

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 chapp...

Any other day of my life I could have won a fibbing contest hands down, and that, that is what I came up with: the pathetic truth (4.41).

I had asked God repeatedly to do something about T. Ray. He'd gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse (1.11).

T. Ray refused to let me bring books out here and read, and if I smuggled one out, say Lost Horizon, stuck under my shirt, somebody, like Mrs. Watson from the next farm, would see him at church an...

I was the only one who knew that despite her sharp ways, her heart was more tender than a flower skin and she loved me beyond reason (1.73).

The day she died was December 3, 1954. The furnace had cooked the air so hot my mother had peeled off her sweater and stood in short sleeves, jerking at the window in her bedroom, wrestling with th...