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6427763
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My prior experience with young men was to hear them swear 'Christ almighty in the craphouse!' at any dress with too many buttons.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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351efe8
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But a Congolese life is like the useless Congolese bill, which you can pile by the fistful or the bucketful into a merchant's hand, and still not purchase a single banana. It's dawning on me that I live among men and women who've simply always understood their whole existence is worth less than a banana to most white people. I see it in their eyes when they glance up at me.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1c17e5b
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Shoes, then, sliding me across the floor to greet the day. Dreaming of coffee. I'm afraid I didn't miss the physical presence of my husband in his absences as much as I missed coffee.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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c0954de
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Well, the ancients might not have been very heroic. Most of them were probably like Mother, crouched somewhere trying to work out how to make fake jawbone jewelry that would look like the real thing.
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heroes
history
people
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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fd9398e
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I was a skeleton with flesh and clothes and thoughts.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f8322db
|
The room looks as if a giant dog after a large lunch of food, socks, paints, trousers and pencils, walked into that room and vomited everywhere.
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humour
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6c2ddb9
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penitence is more attainable than permission.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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c0cebcd
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Summer's heat had never really arrived, nor the cold in it's turn, and everything living now seemed to yearn for sun with the anguish of the unloved. The world of sensible seasons had come undone.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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ff7d850
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There is no point in 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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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4dbc6c3
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The wonder to me now is that I thought my life worth saving...Desperate to save myself in a river of people saving themselves. And if they chanced to look down and see me struggling underneath them, they saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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cb7cffa
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And somehow Hallie thrived anyway--the blossom of our family, like one of those miraculous fruit trees that taps into an invisible vein of nurture and bears radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on living. In Grace, in the old days, when people found one of those in their orchard they called it the semilla besada--the seed that got kissed. Sometimes you'd run across one that people had come to, and returned to, in hop..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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70d1cfb
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That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that's how they do it here. Maybe he's been in Africa so long he's forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it's called Monotony.
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marriage
monogamy
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a9d1b3a
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Man against Nature...Of all the possible conflicts, that was the one that was hopeless. Even a slim education had taught her this much: Man loses.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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68c4b43
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A story is like a painting, Soli. It doesn't have to look like what you see out the window.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e8ee19b
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The last generation's worst fears became the next one's B-grade entertainment.
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generations
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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ce5cf98
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I was occupied so entirely by each day, I felt detached from anything so large as a month or a year. History didn't cross my mind. Now it does. Now I know, whatever your burdens, to hold yourself apart from the lot of more powerful men is an illusion. On that awful day in January 1961, Lumumba paid with a life and so did I. On the wings of an owl the fallen Congo came to haunt even our little family, we messengers of goodwill adrift on a se..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4f26869
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Having children was not like people said. Forget training them in your footsteps; the minute they put down the teething ring and found the Internet, you were useless as a source of anything but shoes and a winter coat.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6ddf32f
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People automatically estimate a mom's IQ at around her children's ages, maybe dividing by the number of kids, rounding up to the nearest pajama size.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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0357e72
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the twins too, they've never cared a hoot what they looked like. They spent so much time staring at each other's faces before they were born they can go the rest of their lives passing up mirrors without a glance.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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ecc5124
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She looked over the bins of tinselly junk and felt despair, trying to find one single thing that wouldn't fall apart before you got it home. Maybe her father was lucky to die young with his pride of craftsmanship intact. What would he make of this world? Realistically, it probably wasn't slave children, but there had to be armies of factory workers making this slapdash stuff, underpaid people cranking out things for underpaid people to buy ..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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81189b9
|
Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.
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food
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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ccb1761
|
Sept 15 1930 at the independence festival of the school of cretins..."At the head of the table by the bowl of pomegranates, Senora Bartolome had put a note: Take only one, our Lord Jesus is watching!. A second note appeared at the foot of the table beside the sugared almonds: Take all you want, Jesus is looking at the pomegranates."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a2180fd
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The effect is both domestic and wild, equal parts geometric and chaotic. It's the visual signature of small, diversified farms that creates the picture-postcard landscape here, along with its celebrated gastronomic one. Couldn't Americans learn to love landscapes like these around our cities, treasuring them not just gastronomically but aesthetically, instead of giving everything over to suburban development? Can we only love agriculture on..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f40b5e9
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On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing; all animals kill to survive, and we are animals. The lion kills the baboon, the baboon kills fat grasshoppers. The elephant tears up living trees, dragging their precious roots from the dirt they love....And we, even if we had no meat or even grass to gnaw, still boil our water to kill the invisible creatures that would like to kill us first. And swallow q..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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818d4ae
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She married him two years ago for love, or so she thought, and he's a good enough man but a devotee of household silence. His idea of marriage is to spray WD-40 on anything that squeaks. ... The quiet only subsides when Harland sleeps and his tonsils make up for lost time.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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945ba54
|
When I was Turtle's age I had never had anyone or anything important taken from me. I still hadn't. Maybe I hadn't started out with a whole lot, but pretty nearly all of it was still with me.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e34cdfb
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Even the bells from the churches have a conversation, all ringing at once.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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2f66e7d
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Every family's its own trip to China.
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relations
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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bf8bc8b
|
When something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.
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love
inspirational
extraordinary
taking-chances
home
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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0519bfc
|
I was so depressed I stopped using hair spray for three weeks.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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03e511d
|
They say you thatched your roof and now you must not run out of your house if it rains.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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dc68847
|
I will never understand it," she said. "We're the top of our food chain, so you'd think we'd relate to those guys the best. Seems like we'd be trying to talk them into trade agreements." Eddie laughed at that. "So you're telling me that as a kid, you were rooting for the wolf to eat the Riding Hood babe?" "My last name was Wolfe. I took it all kind of personally."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1d57ec0
|
Lately whenever I'd scratched somebody's surface I'd turned up a ghost story.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a73b40b
|
Holding and synthesizing information in your brain creates your personality. You're surrendering your personality to an electronic device in your pocket.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a3b1123
|
Well, yeah," Dovey said. "That's America. We watch shows about rich people's houses and their designer dresses and we drool. It's patriotic."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6c4994e
|
A mother can be only as happy as her unhappiest child.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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87b4e46
|
Mom is losing, no doubt, because our vegetables have come to lack two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. Storage and transport take predictable tolls on the volatile plant compounds that subtly add up to taste and food value. Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to decrease palatability. Bizarre as it seems, we've accepted a tradeoff that amounts to: "Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a card..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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15da5a6
|
animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.
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people
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f8a29dd
|
In exchange for his first taste of powdered milk, Pascal showed me a tree we could climb to find a bird's nest. After we handled and examined the pink-skinned baby birds, he popped one of them into his mouth like a jujube. It seemed to please him a lot. He offered a baby bird to me, pantomiming that I should eat it. I understood perfectly well what he meant, but I refused. He did not seem disappointed to have to eat the whole brood himself.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4df1ecb
|
Until that moment I'd thought I could have it both ways; to be one of them, and also my husband's wife. What conceit! I was his instrument, his animal. Nothing more. How we wives and mothers do perish at the hands of our own righteousness. I was just one more of those women who clamp their mouths shut and wave the flag as their nation rolls off to conquer another in war. Guilty or innocent, they have everything to lose. They are what there ..
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women
wife-and-husband
wives
wife
women-s-roles
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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cc23483
|
Two dots an inch apart, as small and tidy as punctuation marks at the end of a sentence none of us could read. The sentence would have started somewhere just above her heart.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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514fe7b
|
Zeke embodied the contradiction of his generation: jaded about the fate of the world, idealistic about personal prospects.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1d7fa81
|
Plus," Tig said, "it reminds me to be patient. Seeing all these people that have passed on. I get frustrated sometimes, waiting." "For people to die?" "Yeah. To be honest. The guys in charge of everything right now are so old. They really are, Mom. Older than you. They figured out the meaning of life in, I guess, the nineteen fifties and sixties. When it looked like there would always be plenty of everything."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6e151c6
|
When the rain pours down especially, we have long hours of captivity, in which my sisters determinedly grow bored. But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them. Everyone else will finish with the singular plowing through, and Ada still has discoveries ahead and behind.
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Barbara Kingsolver |