|
2c4e7f7
|
They saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious. That is what it means to be a beast in the kingdom
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
d592ab0
|
You from out of town?" he asked after a while, eying my car. "No," I said. "I go to Kentucky every year to get my license plate." I didn't like his looks." --
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
547f335
|
The jacaranda in the courtyard has put on its bloom. This purple can't be ignored, it's like a tree singing. The walk down Londres Street to the market is a concert: the small jacaranda on the the corner hums the tuning note, then all others in the lane join in.
|
|
|
barbara kingsolver |
|
ab5a1d0
|
Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behavior in children, and medicate it in adults? That's so random. It's like this whole shady setup.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
764fa2c
|
When people run for their lives they frequently neglect to bring along their file cabinets of evidence," she said. Mattie wasn't often bitter but when she was, she was. I didn't want to believe the world could be so unjust. But of course it was right there in front of my nose."
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
9afd998
|
SUNRISE TANTALIZE, evil eyes hypnotize:
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
92e7c73
|
Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or at least paused to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
f50c897
|
I don't know where to start, Lou Ann," I told her. "There's just so damn much ugliness. Everywhere you look, some big guy kicking some little person when they're down--look what they do to those people at Mattie's. To hell with them, people say, let them die, it was their fault in the first place for being poor or in trouble, or for not being white, or whatever, how dare they try to come to this country."
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
0113ea7
|
What I'm saying is nobody feels sorry for anybody anymore, nobody even pretends they do. Not even the President. It's like it's become unpatriotic.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
7e24b60
|
You know what really gets me?" I asked him. "How people call you 'illegals.' That just pisses me off, I don't know how you can stand it. A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal?"
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
67e87ce
|
If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
e44474b
|
But I'll tell you a secret. When I want to take God at His word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us everyday without a lot of dubious middle managers.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
4287581
|
When I got on the line again the operator was asking for more coins, so I dropped them in. Mama and I listened to the weird bonging song and didn't say anything to each other for a little bit. 'I just lost somebody I was in love with,' I finally told her. 'I just told him goodbye, and I'm never going to see him again.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
5dc1793
|
Sex will get you through times with no money better than money will get you through times with no sex.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
0f4bb71
|
We may not like thinking about it, but germs crawl eternally over every speck of our planet. Our own bodies are bacterial condos, with established relationships between the upstairs and downstairs neighbors. Without these regular residents, our guts are easily taken over by less congenial newcomers looking for low-rent space. What keeps us healthy is an informed coexistence with microbes, rather than the micro-genocide that seems to be the ..
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
7d22715
|
It's terrible to lose somebody," I said, "I mean, I don't know firsthand, but I can imagine it must be. But it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse."
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
461ff0a
|
Sal Monelli was an unfortunate fellow whose name had struck such terror in her heart she forbade him to touch any food item that wasn't sealed and crated. Lou Ann's life was ruled by the fear of salmonella, to the extent that she claimed the only safe way to eat potato salad was to stick your head in the refrigerator and eat it in there.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
5e419a9
|
You can't let your heart go bad like that, like sour milk. There's always a chance you'll want to use it later.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
e8c9207
|
Absence of that knowledge has rendered us a nation of wary label-readers, oddly uneasy in our obligate relationship with the things we eat ... Our words for unhealthy contamination--"soiled" or "dirty"--suggest that if we really knew the number-one ingredient of a garden, we'd all head straight into therapy. I used to take my children's friends out to the garden to warm them up to the idea of eating vegetables, but this strategy sometimes b..
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
03f30f6
|
It is impossible to describe the shock of return. I recall that I stood for the longest time staring at a neatly painted yellow line on a neatly formed cement curb. Yellow yellow line line. I pondered the human industry, the paint, the cement truck and concrete forms, all the resources that had bone into one curb. For what? I could not quite think of an answer. So that no car would park there? Are there so many cars that America must be div..
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
2a966f2
|
Scientists are not like other people, sir. We cannot slam our portals. We have to follow evidence where it leads, even if no one likes that place. Even if it suggests that all we have ever believed might be mistaken.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
bfed57a
|
Oh, Rachel, Rachel," Leah said. "Let me give you a teeny little lesson in political science. Democracy and dictatorship are political systems; they have to do with who participates in the leadership. Socialism and capitalism are economic systems. It has to do with who owns the wealth of the nations, and who gets to eat. Can you grasp that?"
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
bba1325
|
An animal is the sum of its behaviors, its community dynamics. Not just the physical body.
|
|
community-dynamics
monarch-butterflies
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
1281d27
|
The girl was compulsively honest. In earlier years, Willa's every attempt to teach her the artful evasion known as "tact" would get shot down with "Mom, that's lying!" And Tig remained the child who announced when opening gifts at birthday parties, "Thanks, Grandma, I have one of these already and I don't really like it."
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
bfbaf28
|
There but for the grace of serotonin go the rest of us.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
e3ecd6e
|
She laid the side of her face against his frail old heart, where the pink shell of her ear could capture whatever song it had left.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
aa3d92b
|
Except for her weak foundation. The ruin of many a girl, I guess.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
4981077
|
our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
d746468
|
The wounds of this ruptured nation lie open and ugly.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
e50eaa7
|
I realized that I had come to my own terms with the desert, but my soul was thirsty.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
6c7d2e5
|
It is in his absence I prosper.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
993c54a
|
Most people lived so far from it, they thought you could just choose, carnivore or vegetarian, without knowing that the chemicals on grain and cotton killed far more butterflies and bees and bluebirds and whippoorwills than the mortal cost of a steak or a leather jacket.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
089203d
|
I'm out of the habit. I've spent years trying not to want. Just, you know, as an endeavor, like quitting smoking.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
60ab165
|
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.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
d3497cc
|
that mothers' and daughters' hearts can be crushed so repeatedly without learning to defend themselves.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
693b353
|
Was it normal now for parents to operate in the dark? She never knew what was fair to ask.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
9b2e826
|
Mom. The permafrost is melting. Millions of acres of it."Willa tried to see a connection. "And I'm just worried about my house. That's your point?"Tig shook her head. "It's so, so scary. It's going to be fire and rain, Mom. Storms we can't deal with, so many people homeless. Not just homeless but placeless. Cities go underwater and then what? You can't shelter in place anymore when there isn't a place."Willa tucked her hands between her kne..
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
5451a96
|
All knowledge measured, first and last, by one's allegiance to the teacher.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
140f5e7
|
You and I are not like other people. We perceive infinite nature as a fascination, not a threat to our sovereignty.... When the nuisance of old mythologies falls away from us, we may see with new eyes.
|
|
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
|
8662f8d
|
I am like God, Codi? Like GOD? Give me a break. If I get another letter that mentions SAVING THE WORLD, I am sending you, by return mail, a letter bomb. Codi, please. I've got things to do. You say you're not a moral person. What a copout. Sometime, when I wasn't looking, something happened to make you think you were bad. What, did Miss Colder give you a bad mark on your report card? You think you're no good, so you can't do good things. Je..
|
|
|
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 |