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ef05dfa
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The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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212cf8a
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Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you're good, bad things can still happen. And if you're bad, you can still be lucky.
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unfairness
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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66a05ee
|
There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
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sadness
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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2ef01fc
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She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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aeafc79
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Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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5f68973
|
Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.
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forgiveness
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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b23f653
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But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.
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motherhood
parenting
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f04bf72
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I've seen how you can't learn anything when you're trying to look like the smartest person in the room.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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2cd1e5e
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Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.
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the-poisonwood-bible
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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33d3443
|
God doesn't need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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74d19d6
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What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness.
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kindness
life
simplicity
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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5b7549d
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The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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c7a1b7f
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I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.
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library
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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c3eaba1
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A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name.
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motherhood
love
children
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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3319f91
|
The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a27dc85
|
There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a32c7c9
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As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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1600c9e
|
April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant (among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can't keep, all passion is really a setup, and we're doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and would further add: Who cares? Every spring I go out there anyway, around the bend, unconditionally. ... Come the end of the dark days, I am more than..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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d6f1606
|
In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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98f663e
|
What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, 'What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6fe9b16
|
Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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e65b0d4
|
It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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f0e9a34
|
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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06a0f39
|
The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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5a08153
|
When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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42c2cd6
|
In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to gr..
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tucson
dark
joy
life
love
tide
times
taught
kingsolver
rebirth
high
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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1f35194
|
But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after - oh, that's love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she's gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the do..
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unconditional-love
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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6d457b2
|
A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, so people imagine a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had. But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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05ed815
|
There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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0174a94
|
Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
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parenting
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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0eaf032
|
Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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dbc8df9
|
It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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0722f04
|
Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.
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inspirational
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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8add051
|
Emelina and I took each other in. All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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6954536
|
Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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84627b2
|
No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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4dc503a
|
But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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d18a4bf
|
I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which... is at home at the moment.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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0c52de0
|
Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job...And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct...Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this lif..
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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a35b9be
|
Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
bc696f5
|
To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.
|
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
7862867
|
How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
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materialism
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
d17e265
|
Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
23ce24a
|
Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |