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475d7a4
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There are some who'd hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think's been too lucky.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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66a7bf1
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If men only knew, modesty makes women fall in love faster than all the cock-a-doodling in the world.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e6a2328
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Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4143101
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Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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09700a3
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You think you're the foreigner here, and I'm the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner, too.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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7205459
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Our way was to share a fire until it burned down, To speak to each other until every person was satisfied. Younger men listened to older men. Now the tell us the vote of a young, careless man counts the same as the vote of an elder.' In the hazy heat Tata Ndu paused to take off his hat, turn it carefully in his hands, then replace it above the high dome of his forehead. No one breathed. 'White men tell us: They tell us: You do not all..
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voting
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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9e747cb
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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.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6794695
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Soli, let me tell you. The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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7f0a35a
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In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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60292e1
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There's a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true but you haven't told anyone yet. Of all things, that is what I remember most. It was so quiet.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1b3828a
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I suppose it is in our nature," she said finally. "When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order."
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e89c62d
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Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.
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metaphor
heartbreaking
santa
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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3f626fe
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How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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21c5699
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Be sweet and carry a sharp knife, was her motto.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e21b2af
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Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn't.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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26c4a6d
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I never learn anything from listening to myself.
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learning
listening-skills
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1bc73e5
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There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line.... People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It's a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won't commit to knowing everyt..
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science
journalists
scientists
questions
knowledge
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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ab2901c
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Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are is the only possibility
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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10a1551
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Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don't respect his work?
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socialism
work
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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89e3645
|
At some point in the evening Dellarobia had stopped being amazed that Ovid had turned into someone new, and understood he had become himself, in the presence of his wife. With the sense of a great weight settling, she recognized marriage. Not the precarious risk she's balanced for years against forbidden fruits, something easily lost in a brittle moment by flying away or jumping a train to ride off on someone else's steam. She was not about..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a3c53b5
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Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don't; but we wear it all the same
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e1e7a8c
|
The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e807254
|
Beene-beene. The truest truth.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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c2d6e81
|
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work--that goes on, and it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children's bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don't get lost.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1d5c760
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Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, confidence swaggering into the storm: Man against Nature. Of all the possible conflicts, that was the one that was hopeless. Even a slim education had taught her this much: Man loses.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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ff2ad50
|
It's a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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ecf6e80
|
Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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fd44a75
|
What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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74952cf
|
Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what's not in it.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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de9fb5b
|
Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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9b07466
|
Silence has many advantages...I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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deed43f
|
Because nothing wondrous can come in this world unless it rests on the shoulders of kindness.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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2a8feae
|
To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.
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live
story
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e9c4e38
|
She has changed in this way that motherhood changes you, so that you forget you ever had time for small things like despising the color pink.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1085af1
|
Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity *after* their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it's the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand.
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eternity
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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b4b535b
|
Loose lips sink ships.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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2123f75
|
We would not wake up from this nightmare to find out it was someone's real life, and for once that someone wasn't just a poor unlucky nobody in a shack you could forget about. It was our life, the only one we were going to have.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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3f74054
|
But we've all ended up giving body and soul to Africa, one way or another. Even Adah, who's becoming an expert in tropical epidemiology and strange new viruses. Each of us got our heart buried in six feet of African dirt; we are all co-conspirators here. I mean, all of us, not just my family. So what do you do now? You get to find your own way to dig out a heart and shake it off and hold it up to the light again.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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70da809
|
Sympathizing over the behavior of men is the baking soda of women's friendships, it seems,the thing that makes them bubble and rise.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6fe5a16
|
I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.
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reflective
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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c1225ef
|
Do you think its possible to live without wanting to put your name on your paintings? To belong to a group so securely you don't need to rise above it?
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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b001c44
|
In a lifetime of hearing people celebrate weekends, she finally saw what all the fuss was about. By no means did her workload cease on Saturday, but it did shift gears. If her kids wanted to pull everything out of the laundry basket to make a bird's nest and sit in it, fine. Dellarobia could even sit in there with them and incubate, if she so desired. Household chores no longer called her name exclusively. She had an income. She'd never bef..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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51ac81c
|
High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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5d5fc4e
|
Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they're afraid to plant themselves?
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|
Barbara Kingsolver |