|
cb68ebb
|
Right there in the middle of the road he took the cigarette out of my mouth and put it in his, then struck a match on his thumbnail and lit the two of them together, exactly like Humphrey Bogart. Then, ever so gently, he put the lit cigarette back in my lips. It seemed almost like we had kissed. Chills ran down my back, but I couldn't tell for sure if it was thrill chills or the creeps. Sometimes it is very hard to know the difference.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
3dfaf39
|
I may be a preacher's daughter, but I know a thing or two. And one of them is, 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.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
d092d11
|
Chivalry wasn't dead, it's just that men didn't own all the horses anymore, and women of Helene's ilk didn't need that kind of rescue.
|
|
marriage
family
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
a9d7b45
|
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."
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
ab69884
|
There seemed to be no end to the things that could be hiding, waiting it out, right where you thought you could see it all.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
829e603
|
First they would stagger, then grow competent, and then forget the difficulty altogether while thinking of other things, and that was survival.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
086c0ba
|
Cars with flames painted on the hood might get more speeding tickets. Are the flames making the car go fast? No. Certain things just go together. And when they do, they are correlated. It is the darling of all human errors to assume, without proper testing, that one is the cause of the other.
|
|
science
correlation
entomology
monarch-butterflies
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
42e16bc
|
Thatcher wondered what task could be more wearisome than shoring up a stupid man's confidence in his own wisdom.
|
|
stupidity
wisdom
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
a976564
|
Tig was a unique element with all valences open.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
2a3b319
|
They wait out the dry months kind of dead-like, just like everything else, and when the rain comes they wake up and crawl out of the ground and start to holler.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
7e49a96
|
the useful illusion that everything would be fine. It amazed her now to watch people walking through life with their ludicrous trust.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
da0c556
|
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.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
7748dd9
|
Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.' That's
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
6883ce0
|
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 has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
e7ad7d7
|
But from here on in I'm your Ma, and that means I love you the most. Forever
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
2571057
|
I'm a scientist who thinks it wise to enter the doors of creation not with a lion tamer's whip and chair, but with the reverence humankind has traditionally summoned for entering places of worship: a temple, a mosque, or a cathedral. A sacred grove, as ancient as time.
|
|
nature-quotes
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
10f4681
|
They are all for the great captain, while he indentures them and eats their souls and property. Somehow he gets them to side against their own.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
36aceab
|
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"
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
56540ab
|
As the storm moved closer it broke into hundreds of pieces so that the rain fell here and there from the high clouds in long, curving gray plumes.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
87233db
|
It's funny how people don't give that much thought to what kids want, as long as they're being quiet.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
3bb2ba9
|
Oh, it's a fine and useless enterprise, trying to fix destiny. That trail leads straight back to the time before we ever lived, and into that deep well it's easy to cast curses like stones on our ancestors. But that's nothing more than cursing ourselves and all that made us. Had I not married a preacher named Nathan Price, my particular children would never have seen the light of this world. I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, a..
|
|
loss
love
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
f6a59d3
|
realized that I had come to my own terms with the desert, but my soul was thirsty.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
64f4aae
|
One of the skills of grief that Lusa had learned was to hold on tight to the last moments between sleep and waking. Sometimes, then, in the early morning, taking care not to open her eyes or rouse her mind through its warm drowse to the surface where pain broke clear and could, she found she could choose her dreams. She could call a memory and patiently follow it backward into flesh, sound, and scents. It would be come her life once again ..
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
f359e45
|
The women of his family would become one with the earth's creatures only by pressing the bones of whales against their rib cages until breathless.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
97162c5
|
By pure mistake, his implementation is sometimes more pure than his intentions. But mostly it is the other way around. Mostly he shouts, "Praise be!" while the back of his hand knocks you flat."
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
1a5e65e
|
He is the one wife belonging to many white men. Anatole explained it this way: Like a princess in a story, Congo was born too rich for her own good, and attracted attention far and wide from men who desire to rob her blind. The United States has now become the husband of Zaire's economy, and not a very nice one. Exploitive and condescending, in the name of steering her clear of the moral decline inevitable to her nature.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
a69adfd
|
From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
da4622a
|
Truth is objective. A man should be respected for telling it, not threatened.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
b2be710
|
But it was no exaggeration, he'd witnessed this very thing in a market square in Boston: the crude effigy dangling from a noose, the monkey's tail pinned to the stuffed trousers, the murderous crowd chanting Lock him up!
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
9d7c72e
|
Scientific laws are not the property of a man. They exist outside of us.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
c2ff97d
|
do.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
07e42ab
|
Father had not spoken up yet. My theory was he didn't know who to jump on first, the insulting Underdowns or his cussing wife, so he just stood there brewing like a coffeepot.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
e566855
|
We'd worked so hard for God's favor, yet it seemed God was still waiting for some extra labor on our part, and it was up to my father to figure out what.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
31f3177
|
White is not an origin. It's a mental construct of privilege.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
5c8173e
|
Father stared at the trees, giving no indication he'd heard his poor frightened wife, or any of this news. Father would sooner watch us all perish one by one than listen to anybody but himself.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
203ea8e
|
she believed material desires were toxic.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
028e586
|
How had she not seen all this? Willa was the one who raised her anxiety shield against every family medical checkup or late-night ring of the phone, expecting the worst so life couldn't blindside them.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
f3e4c84
|
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 |
|
455d08f
|
times than we ever have known.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
e839952
|
Something like that is as bad or as good as a telephone ringing in the night: either way, you're not as alone as you think.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
9dc2868
|
I'm saying when God slams a door on you it's probably a shitstorm. You're going to end up in rubble. But it's okay because without all that crap overhead, you're standing in the daylight.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
9af2b28
|
But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
cef6dca
|
My favored mulching method is to cover the ground between rows of plants with a year's worth of our saved newspapers; the paper and soy-based ink will decompose by autumn. Then we cover all that newsprint--comics, ax murderers, presidents, and all--with a deep layer of old straw. It is grand to walk down the rows dumping armloads of moldy grass glop onto the faces of your less favorite heads of state: a year in review, already starting to c..
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
ab45c25
|
No rational guidelines existed for comparing youthful freedom with the heart-enlarging earthquake of family life.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |