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4307136
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I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6e8a15d
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The tunnel of winter had settled over our lives, ushered in by that great official Hoodwink, the end of daylight saving time. Personally I would vote for one more hour of light on winter evenings instead of the sudden, extra-early blackout. Whose idea was it to jilt us this way, leaving us in cold November with our unsaved remnants of daylight petering out before the workday ends? In my childhood, as early as that, I remember observing the ..
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life
winter
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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fb66e2b
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The standard approach has been to pump up the dosage of chemicals ... Twenty percent of these approved-for-use pesticides are listed by the EPA as carcinogenic in humans.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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46215f4
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This I need to be told?" she'd snapped. As if, sitting in this kitchen where she felt the disapproving presence of his dead mother, she could forget where he'd grown up. Cole was the youngest of six children, with five sisters who'd traveled no farther than the bottom of the hollow, where Dad Widener had deeded each daughter an acre on which to build a house when she married, meanwhile saving back the remainder of the sixty-acre farm for hi..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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56f7366
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But it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse." After"
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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496a0f1
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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.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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081963d
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On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing: all animals kill to survive, and we are animals.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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03b26d3
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You feel like you'll never run into another one that's worth turning your head around for, but you will. You'll see." "No,"
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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3e870cc
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pagne
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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255ba8b
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fact our shoes filled with mud and our clothes turned to slime, and it was the farthest thing from pleasant. Mosquitoes that had lain dormant through the long drought now hatched and rose from the forest floor in clouds so thick they filled our mouths and nostrils. I learned to draw back my lips and breathe slowly through my teeth, so I wouldn't choke on mosquitoes. When they'd covered our hands and faces with red welts they flew up our sle..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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8f0cfe5
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nothing wondrous can come in this world unless it rests on the shoulders of kindness. He
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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b4e11e2
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admired their own steadfast lives. Right up to the day when hope in all its versions went out of stock,
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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19433e9
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some secrets kept themselves, out of a failure to stand up to the competing rumors. She
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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92df92b
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recreational envy was
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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7d042d6
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It was a rule of marriage: the more desperately you needed alone time with your spouse, the quicker you'd spoil it with a blowout. When
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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8cc8b1f
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Pushing a refrigerated green vegetable from one end of the earth to another is, let's face it, a bizarre use of fuel. But there's a simpler reason to pass up off-season asparagus: it's inferior.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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273254a
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Wardrobe of Denial. Blanchie glanced
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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26e4425
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Damned thing, self-consciousness, like a pitiful stray dog tagging you down the road--so hard to shake off. So easy to get back.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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8505b57
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Her kitchen chairs were equipales that took you in like a hug, which I needed.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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93ecca2
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The end was always curled up there between us, like a sleeping cat, present even in our love-making.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1dba7c8
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Beene-beene.' The truest truth. For my whole sixteen years I've rarely thought I was worth much more than a distracted grumble from God. But now in my shelter of all things impossible, I drift in a warm bath of forgiveness, and it seems pointless to resist. If Anatole can wrap all my rattlebone sins in a blanket and call me goodness itself, why then I'll just believe him.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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98bb60e
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I was exhausted but also for the first time in weeks I felt sleepiness, that rare, delicious liqueur, soaking into my body like blotter paper.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f38d123
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Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behavior in children, and medicate it in adults? That
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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403ff9f
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Why do you suppose the poets talk about hearts?' he asked me suddenly. 'When they discuss emotional damage? The tissue of hearts is tough as a shoe. Did you ever sew up a heart?
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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32a6a33
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800 million people are chronically underfed (6 will die of hunger-related causes while you read this article), it's because they lack money and opportunity, not because food is unavailable in their countries.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e9bc056
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in the first hour of dawn, just as the hem of the sky began to whiten.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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87de8f4
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We will change our ways significantly as a nation not when some laws tell us we have to (remember Prohibition?), but when we want to.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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2333ec8
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Respecting the dignity of a spectacular food means enjoying it at its best.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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8adc3c1
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If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1da27ec
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Children - even when they have endured the unthinkable - have a gift for divining the moment when the grown-ups really need to lighten up.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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ee7f8c2
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We seem to be built with a faulty gauge for moderation.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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b011c11
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I've heard a Buddhist monk suggest the number of food-caused deaths is minimized in steak dinners, which share one death over many meals, whereas the equation is reversed for a bowl of clams.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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7810076
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It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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ae2bcdc
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But Dovey was one of those people who traveled in a medium-size pod of tardiness on which others came to rely.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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d7596da
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Daddy and I got married kind of accidentally.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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2da705f
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U.S. policies restrict feeding cow tissue directly to other cows, but still allow cows to be fed to other animals (like chickens) and the waste from the chickens to be fed back to the cows.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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c466dee
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Why should it feel so risky to count concretely on a future?
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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cabe636
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colonial American and Australian schoolchildren once memorized poems about British skylarks while the blue jays or cockatoos (according to continent) squawked outside, utterly ignored. The dominant culture has a way of becoming more real than the stuff at hand.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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3a54f05
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48-point type, a letter size that big-city newspapers probably reserve for special occasions such as Armageddon. Out here in the heartland, we are not waiting that long. Our local paper's stance on the great big headline letters is: You got 'em, you use 'em.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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9b6d379
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We newspaper readers all have our pet vexations. Somewhere in one of those sections is the column we anxiously turn to for the sole purpose of disagreeing with the columnist. Volubly.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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ccd830a
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we've learned that some of our favorite things like DDT and the propellants in aerosol cans were rapidly unraveling the structure and substance of our biosphere. We gave them up, and reversed the threats. Now the reforms required of us are more systematic, and nobody seems to want to go first. (To be more precise, the U.S.A. wants to go last.)
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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32f8d5c
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I try to be open-minded. And yet this food writer has less sense than God gave a goose about where food comes from. I'd worked on our relationship, moving through the stages of bafflement, denial, and asking this guy out loud, "Where do you live, the moon?"
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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c187fbd
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Christmas music fills our ears with tales of a Palestinian miracle birth, a generous Turkish saint whom the Dutch dressed in a red suit, and a Druid ceremonial tree...
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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c034fc2
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less the same in her own home, which she'd had no chance to clean. If neither of these qualified in Hester's mind as valid church-excused emergencies, Dellarobia
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Barbara Kingsolver |