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5560c1b
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In almost thirty years of walking around on the grass of the world, she couldn't recall having spent two minutes alone with a butterfly.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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22c3114
|
I understood that the terror of my recurring dream was not about losing just vision, but the whole of myself, whatever that was. What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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9f4aa16
|
How could two people get the same set of parts and make such different constructions? But then, there was rising. That had to be taken into account. What could a doormat rear but a pair of boots?
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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c89e649
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So she was what Hester called a 911 Christian: in the event of an emergency, call the Lord.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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30a6f23
|
You don't ask questions of an attic
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profound
telling
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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52b0e9a
|
The best artifact was the calendar of the ancients, a great carved piece of stone as big as a kitchen, circular, bolted to the wall like a giant clock. In the center was an angry face looking out, as if he'd come through that stone from some other place to have a look at us, and not very pleased about it.
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smilie
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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82e8b78
|
No one seemed to realize calculating sums requires only the most basic machinery and good concentration. Poetry is far more difficult. And palindromes, with their perfect, satisfying taste: Draw a level award! Yet it is always the thin gray grocery sums that make an impression.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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0e99521
|
My future was mapped in negatives. Next year, I could be anywhere but here.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4fb88fd
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Like Daniel she enteres the lions' den, but lacking Daniel's pure and unblemished soul, Ada is spiced with the flavors of vice that make for a tasty meal. Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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443a47a
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I could see that the whole idea and business of Childhood was nothing guaranteed. It seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown-up life like a frill on a dress.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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06be676
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I looked hard out the window and understood suddenly that what I saw was full of color. A watercolor wash of summer light lay on the Catalina Mountains. The end of a depression is that clear: it's as if you have been living underwater, but never realized it until you came up for air.
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depression
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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5ccb281
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Sometimes the past can vanish.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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fe707ba
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But the pill did nothing, probably expired like everything else on the premises.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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37fec17
|
Her name, he says like the Lord's taken in vain. Sometimes he says "Mexico," and the word has nothing in it at all. A wall with no colors painted on it."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4864e2f
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mountains. They stand at every view, like a mother offering a blanket in which to wrap everyday life and shelter it from useless. dreads. In june they are walls of white rhodendron blossom. In autumn the forests set themselves afflame with color. Even winter has its icy charms.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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3dfbac7
|
And all of us with our closed eyes smelled the frangipani blossoms in the big rectangles of open wall, flowers so sweet they conjure up sin or heaven, depending on which way you are headed.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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074f568
|
What Aunt Tess loved to say was: "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 your pace."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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135410e
|
The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go. 'We're like coyotes,' he said. 'Get to a good place, turn around three times in the grass, and you're home. Once you know how, you can always do that, no matter what. You won't forget.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f60b9f3
|
He would have no inkling of the great slog of effort that tied up people like her in the day-to-day.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1c94e53
|
But other people fast or walk long pilgrimages to honor the spirit of what they believe makes our world whole and lovely. If we gardeners can, in the same spirit, put our heels to the shovel, kneel before a trench holding tender roots, and then wait three years for an edible incarnation of the spring equinox, who's to make the call between ridiculous and reverent?
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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9300f6e
|
He's not from here, that's the thing," Cub said. "Just because he's the outsider, he has no say? Should we not read books, then, or listen to nobody outside this county? Where's that going to leave us?"
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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215d3f5
|
Finally Cub said, "They don't call it global weirding." "I know. But I think that's actually the idea." Cub shook his head. "Weather is the Lord's business."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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687aa63
|
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.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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7603c83
|
I knew Rome was burning, but I had just enough water to scrub the floors, so I did what I could.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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66a489b
|
Some of life's greatest calls were answered not by the head but by the body.
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head
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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7082d82
|
There's nothing like living as a refugee in one's own country to turn a generous soul into a hard little fist.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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b4e6a63
|
Every one of us is called upon, probably 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... Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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7165bca
|
This is what it means to be very slow: every story you would like to tell has already ended before you can open your mouth.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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ebe3674
|
Really it was her mother she'd wanted to call right after the bad news, or in the middle of it, while Mr. Petrofaccio was blowing his nose. First thing in the morning, last thing at night, whenever a fight with Tig left her in pieces, it had been her mother who put Willa back together. When someone mattered like that, you didn't lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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cbd1ef1
|
His confidence was enviable and maddening. Most of the time she didn't want him to solve or contradict her worries, she just needed him to listen and agree with her on the awfulness at hand. This was a principle of marriage she'd explained many times.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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16b3768
|
Beautiful people liked to claim looks didn't matter, while throwing that currency around like novice bank robbers.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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3462f64
|
Outside in the sun the Holy Mother stood on her pedestal in the garden, sorry but unsympathetic. The usual position of mothers.
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|
sympathy
the-lacuna
mothers
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
867079d
|
When men want to kiss you they act like they are just on the brink of doing something that's going to change the whole wide world.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
4cb9973
|
The Middle East and North Africa are almost out of water. Asia's underwater. Syria is dystopian, Somalia, Bangladesh, dystopian. Everybody's getting weather that never happened before. Melting permafrost means we've got like, a minute to turn this mess around, or else it's going to stop us.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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d1e8eed
|
He got born in the historical moment of no more free lunch. Friends will probably count more than money, because wanting too much stuff is going to be toxic.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e0ca432
|
According to her, if he hasn't been dead twenty years, he isn't history.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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19e4451
|
My thoughts kept straying onto random paths...hoping to get lost in a thicket.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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215d1ef
|
The purpose of art is to elevate the spirit or to pay a surgeon's bill. Or both. It can help a person remember or forget.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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ceefb54
|
I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, and learned to love what I could lose.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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5304329
|
Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony. If I'd known what marriage was going to be like, well, heck, I probably would have tied all those hope-chest linens together into a rope and hung myself from a tree!
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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9415c42
|
It was his habit, when he rewrote anything, to shed himself of all earlier versions. He kept a clean house.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
c298f24
|
The sloped desert plain that lay between us and the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds.
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
aa6917c
|
Have you heard the songs they sing here in Kilanga?" he asked. "They're very worshipful. It's a grand way to begin a church service, singing a Congolese hymn to the rainfall on the seed yams. It's quite easy to move from there to the parable of the mustard seed. Many parts of the Bible make good sense here, if only you change a few words." He laughed. "And a lot of whole chapters, sure, you just have to throw away." "Well, it's every bit Go..
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|
spirituality
religion
religion-and-philosophy
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
deb5128
|
I suppose it is in our nature," she said finally. "When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order." "If that is our nature, then nature is madness. These are more dangerous times than we ever have known."
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |