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5d75a3b
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If it crosses your mind that water running through hundreds of miles of open ditch in a desert will evaporate and end up full of concentrated salts and muck, then let me just tell you, that kind of negative thinking will never get you elected to public office in the state of Arizona. When this giant new tap turned on, developers drew up plans to roll pink stucco subdivisions across the desert in all directions. The rest of us were supposed ..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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5de9e03
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Feminine' was a test like some witch trial she was preordained to fail.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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0f69018
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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 bits of color, a sentence or a fragrance, something that changes and then disappears. It drops like a stone to the bottom of the cave.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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8548dde
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Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man's skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people's back yards.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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0ae371c
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Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he's entitled to joy rather than submission?
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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386355c
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Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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bfef6d0
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Most people of my grandparents' generation had an intuitive sense of agricultural basics ... This knowledge has vanished from our culture. We also have largely convinced ourselves it wasn't too important. Consider how many Americans might respond to a proposal that agriculture was to become a mandatory subject in all schools ... A fair number of parents would get hot under the collar to see their kids' attention being pulled away from the ..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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16d2fe3
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We're a nation with an eating disorder, and we know it. The multiple maladies caused by bad eating are taking a dire toll on our health--most tragically for our kids, who are predicted to be this country's first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. That alone is a stunning enough fact to give us pause. So is a government policy that advises us to eat more fruits and vegetables, while doling out subsidies not to f..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1ea4853
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Entomologist Dr. Ovid Byron speaking to television journalist, Tina, who says, re: global warming, "Scientists of course are in disagreement about whether this is happening and whether humans have a role." He replies: "The Arctic is genuinely collapsing. Scientists used to call these things the canary in the mine. What they say now is, The canary is dead. We are at the top of Niagara Falls, Tina, in a canoe. There is an image for your viewe..
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climate-crisis
monarch-butterflies
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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65460d4
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As I looked at her there among the pumpkins I was overcome with the color and the intesity of my life. In these moments we are driven to try and hoard happiness by taking photographs, but I know better. The improtant thing was what the colors stood for, the taste of hard apples and the existence of Lena and the exact quality of the sun on the last warm day in October. A photograph would have flattened the scene into a happy moment, whereas ..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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8fed788
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You know reviewers, they are the wind in their own sails.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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28e5c77
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But newspapers have a duty to truth,' Van said. Lev clucked his tongue. 'They tell the truth only as the exception. Zola wrote that the mendacity of the press could be divided into two groups: the yellow press lies every day without hesitating. But others, like the Times, speak the truth on all inconsequential occasions, so they can deceive the public with the requisite authority when it becomes necessary.' Van got up from his chair to gath..
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press
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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3899a38
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But being a stay-at-home mom was the loneliest kind of lonely, in which she was always and never by herself.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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3b7ca77
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Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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786aa22
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Mama always said barefoot and pregnant was not my style. She knew.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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b13a3a6
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Mother could go for one year without food, but not one day without her lip sticks.
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wordplay
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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07caa83
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Take your place, then. Look at what happened from every side and consider all the other ways it could have gone. Consider, even, an Africa unconquered altogether. Imagine those first Portuguese adventurers approaching the shore, spying on the jungle's edge through their fitted brass lenses. Imagine that by some miracle of dread or reverence they lowered their spyglasses, turned, set their riggings, sailed on. Imagine all who came after doin..
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freedom
alternative-histories
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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39ab782
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I prefer to remain anomalous.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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23ad98a
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You think you're no good, so you can't do good things. Jesus, Codi, how long are you going to keep limping around on that crutch? It's the other way around, it's what you *do* that makes you who you are.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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940028c
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Most of us are creatures so comforted by habit, it can take something on the order of religion to invoke new, more conscious behaviors--however glad we may be afterward that we went to the trouble.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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247fca4
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Mexico admits you through an arched stone orifice into the tree-filled courtyard of its heart, where a dog pisses against a wall and a waiter hustles through a curtain of jasmine to bring a bowl of tortilla soup, steaming with cilantro and lime. Cats stalk lizards among the clay pots around the fountain, doves settle into the flowering vines and coo their prayers, thankful for the existence of lizards. The potted plants silently exhale, out..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e31dae4
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As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing...he did not claim that God moves in mysterious ways. Instead he seemed to believe, as she did, though they never could have discussed it, that 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.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1871a7a
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A blank space on a form, the missing page, a void, a hole in your knowledge of someone--it's still some real . It exists. You don't get to fill it in with whatever you want.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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99d1cd9
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Doesn't the Federal Farm bill help out all these poor farmers? No. It used to, but ever since its inception just after the Depression, the Federal Farm Bill has slowly been altered by agribusiness lobbyists. It is now largely corporate welfare ... It is this, rather than any improved efficiency or productiveness, that has allowed corporations to take over farming in the United States, leaving fewer than a third of our farms still run by fam..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f860b02
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It was hard to feel the remotest sympathy for any of the different fools she'd been. As opposed to the fool she was being now. People hang on to that one, she thought: the fool they are right now.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4aad49c
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Most of them don't know what communism is, could not pick it out of a lineup. They only know what anticommunism is. The two are practically unrelated.
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barbara-kingsolver
dies-committee
mccarthyism
the-lacuna
communism
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4c7cc37
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Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.
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life
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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24b4f17
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A bird in the hand loses its mystery in no time flat.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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cc6e9a2
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That means you're my kid," I explained, "and I'm your mother, and nobody can say it isn't so."
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talyor-greer
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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59321b8
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My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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91f130e
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It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life... Maybe being perfectly happy is not really the point. Maybe that is only some modern American dream of the point, while the truer measure of humanity is the distance we must travel in our lives, time and again, "twixt two extremes of passion--joy and grie..
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grief
joy
life
love
salvation
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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cd504b3
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I should like to write my books only for the dear person who lies awake reading in bed until page last, then lets the open book fall gently on her face, to touch her smile or drink her tears.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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dda0759
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What a rich wisdom it would be, and how much more bountiful a harvest, to gain pleasure not from achieving personal perfection but from understanding the inevitability of imperfection and pardoning those who also fall short of it.
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humanity
wisdom
imperfection
grace
forgiveness
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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fa532cc
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A novel! Why do you say this won't liberate anyone? Where does any man go to be free, whether he is poor or rich or even in prison? To Dostoyevsky! To Gogol!
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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d2574cb
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Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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5661e06
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No reporter worth his buttons will let the facts intrude on a good story.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1da36d4
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To think is not always to see.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a0e974d
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My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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808bc0b
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Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I was afflicted with Africa like a bout of a rare disease from which I have not managed a full recovery.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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95771b3
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Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6f7fa90
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What you hold in your hands right now, beneath these words, is consecrated air and time and sunlight and, first of all, a place.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a1409b2
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Pay attention to your dreams; when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4fe80eb
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So one time when I was working in this motel one of the toilets leaked and I had to replace the flapper ball. Here's what it said on the package; I kept it till I knew it by heart: 'Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.' That's kind of my philosophy about men. I don't think there's an installation out there that could use all of my parts.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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26e1f4e
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Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.
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Barbara Kingsolver |