|
3ca8237
|
Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
676eb14
|
Modern people are just like ancient ones, only more numerous.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
435a3d6
|
Spring is made of solid, fourteen-karat gratitude, the reward for the long wait. Every religious tradition from the northern hemisphere honors some form of April hallelujah, for this is the season of exquisite redemption, a slam-bang return to joy after a season of cold second thoughts.
|
|
joy
spring
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
b87f2d4
|
on asparagus) Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac, and the church banned it from nunneries.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
9c31f18
|
She would die of him or be cured.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
e058a54
|
She would just be catching up when I'd go again, swimming farther out into life because I still hadn't found a rock to stand on.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
8a639b4
|
You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they're not self-sufficient.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
71633ca
|
Time cures you first, and then it kills you.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
bf5ec5d
|
It's monstrous, what one person will do to another.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
d9b0fbb
|
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
85c69c7
|
And here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn't really want to eat 700 more calories a day.
|
|
humor
slow-food-nation
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
8f32b90
|
When push comes to shove, a mother takes care of her children from the bottom up.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
98c86da
|
everything else is in motion while God does not move at all. God sits still, perfectly at rest, the silver dollar at the bottom of the well, the question.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
5ebb02d
|
The power of words is awful, Frida. Sometimes I want to bury my typewriter in a box of quilts. The radio makes everything worse, because of the knack for amplifying dull sounds. Any two words spoken in haste might become law of the land. But you never know which two. You see why I won't talk to newsmen.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
ee079c3
|
The longer I think about a food industry organized around an animal that cannot reproduce itself without technical assistance, the more I mistrust it. Poultry, a significant part of the modern diet, is emblematic of the whole dirty deal. Having no self-sustaining bloodlines to back up the industry is like having no gold standard to underpin paper currency. Maintaining a natural breeding poultry flock is a rebellion, at the most basic level,..
|
|
food
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
2255001
|
It feels strange to me to be living in a box, hiding from the steadying influence of the moon; wearing the hide of a cow, which is supposed to be dyed to match God-knows-what, on my feet; making promises over the telephone about things I will do at a precise hour next year.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
d81af4c
|
So you make a deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.'... "'No, it's not like that. It's not making a deal, bad things can still happen, but you want to try not to CAUSE them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance.... Really, it's like the spirits have made a deal with US.... We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough ..
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
9f98184
|
It's just lucky for Father he never had any sons. He might have been forced to respect them.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
2765970
|
I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
37e2d88
|
But luck is just throwing dice.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
ee3e1eb
|
Back in Georgia everybody we knew had an automobile." A bu, don't tell stories. That is not possible." Well, not everybody. I don't mean babies and children. But every single family." Not possible." Yes, it is! Some families even have two!" What is the purpose of so many automobiles at the same time?" Well, because everybody has someplace to go every day. To work or to the store or something." And why is nobody walking?" It's not li..
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
52decc8
|
His mustache made two curved lines around the sides of his mouth like parentheses, as if everything he might say would be very quiet, and incidental.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
c3e06bc
|
Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind of all one.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
f399552
|
In her experience people had worries or they had tons of money, not both.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
339c427
|
If you're standing in the manure pile, it's somebody's job to mention the stink.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
6e209e3
|
A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't, this world would end at once.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
01fa101
|
Come on, people. Doesn't anybody remember how to take a big old knife, whack open a pumpkin, scrape out the seeds, and bake it? We can carve a face onto it, but can't draw and quarter it? Are we not a nation known worldwide for our cultural zest for blowing up flesh, on movie and video screens and/or armed conflict? Are we in actual fact too squeamish to stab a large knife into a pumpkin? Wait till our enemies find out.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
b0c4249
|
He doesn't even look at her because there is too much there, and he's afraid. She is his first child, his favorite, every mistake he ever made.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
8064015
|
The seat of human emotion should be the liver," Doc Homer said. "That would be an appropriate metaphor: we don't hold love in our hearts, we hold it in our livers." I understood exactly. Once in ER I saw a woman who'd been stabbed everywhere, most severely in the liver. It's an organ with the consistency of layer upon layer of wet Kleenex. Every attempt at repair just opens new holes that tear and bleed. You try to close the wound with fres..
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
01cf4ef
|
What do you think people want, if it's not greatness and to be remembered for all time?" "Mostly? I believe people want to eat a good lunch, and then take a good piss." --
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
4bba88e
|
Look, if I don't flirt with you, you should take that as a compliment. I don't always respect myself, but I almost never respect men. They're like flowers all showy, a lot of color and lust. You pick them and throw them on the ground. But you I respect. I always did. From the first day I saw you.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
0a82bd0
|
Your blood for mine. If not these, then those. War is the supreme mathematics problem. It strains our skulls, yet we work out the sums, believing we have pressed the most monstrous quantities into a balanced equation.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
2497daf
|
When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
f53fd27
|
That night marks my life's dark center, the moment when growing up ended and the long downward slope toward death began. The wonder to me now is that I thought myself worth saving...I reached out and clung for life with my good left hand like a claw, grasping at moving legs to raise myself from the dirt. Desperate to save myself in a river of people saving themselves. And if they chanced to look down and see me struggling underneath them, t..
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
b86c74d
|
It's interesting that penny-pinching is an accepted defense for toxic food habits, when frugality so rarely rules other consumer domains. The majority of Americans buy bottled drinking water, for example, even though water runs from the faucets at home for a fraction of the cost, and government quality standards are stricter for tap water than for bottled. At any income level, we can be relied upon for categorically unnecessary purchases: p..
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
9294620
|
Mother, you can still hold hold on but forgive, forgive and give for long as long as we both shall live, I forgive you, Mother.
|
|
motherhood
love
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
ff5f1ce
|
But humans have a built-in weakness for fats and sugar. We evolved in lean environments where it was a big plus for survival to gorge on calorie-dense foods whenever we found them. Whether or not they understand the biology, food marketers know the weakness and have exploited it without mercy. Obesity is generally viewed as a failure of personal resolve, with no acknowledgement of the genuine conspiracy in this historical scheme. People act..
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
001aaf4
|
We cannot jump to conclusions. All we can do is measure and count. That is the task of science.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
7550b5b
|
For the first time in her life she could see perfectly well how a person arrived on that flight path: needing an alternative to the present so badly, the only doorway was a high window.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
b6b4647
|
Communism? Most people have no idea what it is. I do not exaggerate. Look around this restaurant, ask any of these fine citizens. 'Excuse me, sir, I've been thinking of an idea, a bunch of working people owning the means of their own production. What do you make of that?' You know, he might be all for it.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
5957b40
|
You can't know somebody, I thought, till you've followed him home.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
e23b68a
|
Sometimes history cleaves and for one helpless moment stands still like the pause when the ax splits a log and the two halves rest on end waiting to fall.
|
|
ww-ii
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
2d3628e
|
The obstinate practicality of old women pierces and fortifies these families like the steel rods buried in walls of powdery concrete.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
d299137
|
A lifetime of people, unconfirmed by their living presences, or photographs or descriptions in a notebook, can only skulk in the corners like ghosts. They shift like chimeras. Careful words of warning reverse themselves like truth and newspaper stories, becoming their own opposites. An imperfectly remembered life is a useless treachery. Every day, more fragments of the past roll around heavily in the chambers of an empty brain, shedding bit..
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |