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fbddbbc
|
Was this what they meant by hot flashes? But they didn't feel hot. Her body felt full and heavy and slow and human and absent somehow, just a weight to be carried forward without its enthusiastic cycles of fertility and rest, the crests and valleys she had never realized she counted on so much. Dead weight? Was that what she was now; an obsolete female biding its time until death?
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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55ff6c4
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He's legitimizing personal greed as the principal religion of our country.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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c6bf963
|
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 |
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9b17f93
|
So much energy squandered in the unwinnable war waged by woman against the life-form she is.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6b06b7a
|
When you're given a brilliant child, you polish her and let her shine.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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bb1d3f2
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Of course the scientist's position is subordinate. Our task is to make our fussy natures invisible against the mechanisms of the universe. Truth is not ours to find within, but to search out. We study the known world in order to recognize the remarkable.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a8ee74a
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Some people say religion is finding yourself, and some people say it's losing yourself in a crowd.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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555485a
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How dire was the descent of a man's life, Thatcher mused, that he should now be stricken with spider jealousy.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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fef7c18
|
She breathed in slowly; this was what she had, the beauty of this awful night. She listened for small yips in the distance, something to put in her heart besides the lost phoebes and the dread of another full moon rising with no more small celebrations from her body ever again. She kept herself still and tried to think of coyote children emerging from the forest's womb with their eyes wide open while the finite possibilities of her own chil..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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88918e1
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Willa's lifelong service to the duty of proper order now seemed like an idiot's game.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a9deeb7
|
Without shelter, we stand in daylight.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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82e2b73
|
I read what Hallie said about not wanting to save the world, that you didn't choose your road for the reward at the end, but for the way it felt as you went along.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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38e2ea6
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This marriage has failed to warm her.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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68f4fee
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We try to reason with one another, but only manage to tear ourselves apart.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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90735b7
|
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 |
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180efd6
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To have been made the creatures we are is a marvel. If the process required millennia rather than seven days, how can it be any less sublime?
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a407e4d
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Every education brings a point of reckoning, and this was his: seeing the world divided in two camps, the investigators and the sweeteners
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6d95969
|
How are people so irrational?" he asked, but he knew. Even the abolitionists had no wish to be placed inside creation, subject to its laws. They wished to rule over it from the head of God's table."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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ab9800a
|
Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're just particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6a2e58e
|
We only knew, somewhat abstractly, we were going to spend a year integrating our food choices with our family values, which include both "love your neighbor" and "try not to wreck every blooming thing on the planet while you're here."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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576f629
|
Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, i have taught myself joy, over and over again.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f189b51
|
So if it's not this exact prophet of self-indulgence we're looking to for reassurance, it will be some other liar who's good at distracting us from the truth.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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fe70018
|
She stops trying to talk for a while, since there is nothing to say about a lost child that can change one star in a father's lonely sky.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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d9d9873
|
At his last checkup the pediatrician had observed the howling red face and trembling limbs, and said that infants process grief as trauma. Then suggested they try a different formula.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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be99820
|
Imagine if each of these grew to be a maple. There should be no room in Vineland for us to stand between them. It's the same with mice or dandelions. Many more seeds and pups are dropped than may prosper. Otherwise we would be pressed like keepsakes among all the flora and fauna of this planet. Our saving grace, ladies and gentlemen, is what?" He watched mouths move in a silent chorus: Death. "Yes. Our salvation is the reaper. The mouse rea..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a75becf
|
being dead seemed a lot like not being born yet, and I hadn't especially minded that.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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44db027
|
Don't count on it. There's a lot of white folks out there hanging on to their God-given right to look down on some other class of people
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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577e6da
|
Really it's just down to a handful of guys piling up everything they can grab and sitting on top of it. And a million poor jerks like Papu still hoping they can get into the club. How long can that last? Five or six more years?
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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578f07e
|
Mama says their skin bears scars different from ours because their skin is a map of all the sorrows in their lives.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f2d28af
|
Waar het om gaat is dat als je het hebt over identiteit, je dat niet zomaar uit mensen kunt wegredeneren. Het verdwijnt niet door de minachting van buitenstaanders, het wordt er juist door verhevigd.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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055add6
|
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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9d836e9
|
One percent of the brotherhood has their hands on most of the bread. They own the country, their god is the free market, and most people are so unhorrified they won't even question the system. If it makes a profit, that's the definition of good. If it grows, you have to stand back and let it. The free market has exactly the same morality as a cancer cell.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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bbcaf90
|
Corporate growers, if their only motive is profit, will find ways to follow the letter of organic regulations while violating their spirit.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f8483cc
|
I am looking for the door to another world. I've waited thousands of years. Take me.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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739a11f
|
But honestly, XARrizZON! It sounds like strangling. What kind of a name is that?" "It was a president, senora." "Of what? Some place where they don't have any oxygen?" "Of the United States." "As I said."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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69793ce
|
He said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and people would still vote for him. Am I dreaming this?" Willa asked. "No." "No. He said that. It couldn't have been more than a week ago." "Apparently he was right." "Iano, nobody gets away with murder. You can't behave like a madman when you're running for public office. That kind of trash talk is supposed to end careers."
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public-office
vote
trash-talk
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Barbara Kingsolver |
|
2cde4b7
|
A mother can be only as happy as her unhappiest child
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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dab140f
|
Mary and Thatcher had lived in enviable times, when biologists were discovering new species right and left, not watching them go extinct.
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species
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e61a680
|
Willa believed in the power of worry to keep another human from flying out of orbit.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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53d77f1
|
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain. Almost no one gets a chance to alter the course of human events on purpose, in the exact same way they wish for it to be altered.
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clearly
penny
fate
human
destiny
fountain
events
wish
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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30f3594
|
In my opinion, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you loook down on them from a great height.
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great
mountains
greatness
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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f4c6c2d
|
Converstations with a mother of five are education in patience.
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kids
mother
patience
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
b5e9cda
|
When I was in my thirties I had these little square hips left over from being pregnant and I just hated it. I kept thinking, 'All those years before, I had a perfect glamour-girl body, and I didn't spend one minute appreciating it because I thought my nose had a bump in it.' And now that I'm old, my shoulder hurts and I don't sleep good and my knuckles swell up, and I think, 'All those years in my thirties and forties I had a body where eve..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
|
a74eb16
|
Iano ordered her back to Ivins to finish her degree in biology. Willa wondered when he would notice Tig was immune to his directives. Tig informed her parents she refused to take out bank loans, with tuition exchange no longer an option, and anyway she'd already learned more than she wanted to know about a ravaged biosphere. The latter was no news to Willa, who'd seen how the girl always took the truth of human selfishness harder than any o..
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Barbara Kingsolver |