|
93a9dc7
|
But approaching mealtimes as a creative opportunity, rather than a chore, is an option.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
506ce41
|
Well, that's how thick I am, I never knew how to want what everyone wants. I only thought to look for a home, some place to be taken in. Handing over a crumpled heart, seeing it dropped in the wastepaper basket every time. Here, though. Americans sent love letters in return.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
6ed93d7
|
The dancers were butterflies. From a hundred paces Salome could see the dirt under these girls' fingernails, but not their wings.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
bf5b9e4
|
Because what would be left, when all these books were in the past? He lay awake nights dreading it.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
fbefeb9
|
There he'd found the pasteboard notebook: the most beautiful book ever, it could become anything.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
c751ffa
|
The notebook from the tobacco stand was the beginning of hope: a prisoner's plan for escape. Its empty pages would be the book of everything, miraculous and unending like the sea at night, a heartbeat that never stops. Salome for her part was not worried about running out of books, only of having her clothes go out of fashion.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
3bcf64f
|
quoting Diaz: "Only in her home, like a butterfly in a glass jar, can woman progress to her highest level of decency."
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
07350a8
|
In the scullery kitchens and probably the salt mines of this world, many a child is not so much raised as hammered into shape, Artie. To be of use. Surviving by the grace of utility alone.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
0dc3cbf
|
Oh, and the camel. Was it a camel that could pass through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man? Or a coarse piece of yarn? The Hebrew words are the same, but which one did they mean? If it's a camel, the rich man might as well not even try. But if it's the yarn, he might well succeed with a lot of effort, you see?
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
21d91ea
|
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.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
fef7050
|
I am not sure how so many Americans came to believe only our wealthy are capable of honoring a food aesthetic.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
8dfe765
|
For my part, I merely watched young, deprived female bosoms panting before my handsome husband, soldier of the Lord. (I longed to shout: Go ahead and try him, girls, I am too tired!)
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
21dc1a8
|
Passing through every wall are electronic beams that create a shadow play of desire staged by the puppeteers of globalized commerce, who fund their advertising each year with more than a hundred dollars spent for this planet's every man, woman, child.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
886af30
|
I am losing faith in such a simple thing as despising an enemy with unequivocal righteousness.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
a4867e8
|
Can one who hates right govern?" Job 34:13,"
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
4e4db7b
|
it. But when a man's words are taken from him and poisoned, it's the same as poisoning the man. He could not speak, for how his own tongue would be fouled. Words were his all. I felt I'd witnessed a murder, just as he'd seen his friend murdered in Mexico. Only this time they left the body living.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
957f456
|
If it came to pass that Thatcher should shake hands with President Grant, as Polly predicted, he would still be a man who viewed life from the bottom of the ditch, not the top.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
8753bb2
|
because it takes your sleeping self years to catch up to where you really are. Pay attention to your dreams: when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
7821e8c
|
With that one little booklet put back in place, it came as a different story. Because of that burrow through rock and water--lacuna, he called it. This time I read with a different heart, understanding the hero would still be standing at journey's end. Or at least, live or die, he'd known of a chance and aimed to take it.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
316003b
|
If God speaks for the man who keeps quiet, then Violet Brown may be His instrument.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
d4f82cc
|
Well, my stars, the thing was like the Bible--look hard enough in its pages, and you'll find what you seek. Love your neighbor, or slay him with the jawbone of an ass.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
b731519
|
Zola wrote that the mendacity of the press could be divided into two groups: the yellow press lies every day without hesitating. But others, like the Times, speak the truth on all inconsequential occasions, so they can deceive the public with the requisite authority when it becomes necessary.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
b5c1beb
|
To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story...
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
6e0cae6
|
Freedom of the presses to destroy a person's life for no good reason." (Lacuna, p. 419)"
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
c8e88a8
|
No matter what affronts of youthful insolence he had to face in his day, he'd still have that: he was a man taken care of by a woman.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
ff59687
|
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. And they're applying that to now...
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
fce75f3
|
Even this far inland, New Jersey was still recovering from Hurricane Sandy, which in its time, a few years back, had been called the storm of the century. How foolish it seemed now to label anything "of the century." This one was still a teenager with an anger-management problem and a long future ahead."
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
a004e1b
|
shambles in her sternum.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
99ea266
|
bare wood of her son beneath the bark
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
8b70f4f
|
dandling
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
b9f6c4f
|
brain salts
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
09579d8
|
It is widely rumored, and also true, that I wrote my first novel in a closet.
|
|
writing
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
998d679
|
TELL ALL THE TRUTH but tell it slant, says my friend Emily Dickinson.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
171c87c
|
All human odes are essentially one. "My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it."
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
61d8b10
|
The question is, why do you think you can't be a writer?
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
0edd034
|
He behaves as if he had no dead children. The real Leandro never comes here. He only pretends.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
791d865
|
Tata Jesus is bangala!
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
1163578
|
To hear you tell it, you'd think man was only put on this earth to keep urinals from going to waste.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
b64c8a8
|
here where we pay soothsayers and acrobats to help lose our weight,
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
eb3286f
|
Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity after their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it's the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
7e8720c
|
It seems like almost anything is better than having only yourself to blame when you screw things up.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
a998b86
|
It ran deeper than that. I'd lost what there was to lose: first my mother and then my baby. Nothing you love will stay. Hallie could call that attitude a crutch, but she didn't know, she hadn't loved and lost so deeply. As Loyd said, she'd never been born--not into life as I knew it. Hallie could still risk everything.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
3ac56b3
|
Eaters must understand," Wendell Berry writes, "that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used."
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
374ebf9
|
The only useful generalization I'd hazard about rural politics is that they tend to break on the line of "insider" vs. "outsider." When my country neighbors sit down with a new social group, the first question they ask one another is not "What do you do?" but rather, "Who are your people?"
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |