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0eaa3d7
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Looking out on a clean plank of planet earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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76719d0
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These paintings say Mexico is an ancient thing that will still go on forever telling its own story in slabs of color leaves and fruits and proud naked Indians in a history without shame. Their great city of Tenochtitlan is still here beneath our shoes and history was always just like today full of markets and wanting.
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méxico
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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18eb4ba
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Sometimes I've survived anger only one minute at a time, by saying to myself again and again that the best kind of revenge is some kind of life beyond this, some kind of goodness. And I can lay no claim to goodness until I can prove that mean people have not made me mean.
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revenge
kindness
inspiring
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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669b16e
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Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4643f89
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His scent burst onto her brain like a rain of lights, causing her to know him perfectly. This is how moths speak to each other. The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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3ac773a
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AS LONG AS I KEPT MOVING, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop. The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill. My body understo..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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762b1c3
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Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.
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lucky-people
the-lacuna
luck
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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07c9c05
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First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A g..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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d3eab50
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a single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. and, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. this forest eats itself and lives forever.
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nature
forest
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e061efd
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Nathan was something that happened to us, as devastating in its way as the burning roof that fell on the family Mwanza; with our fate scarred by hell and brimstone we still had to track our course. And it happened finally by the grace of hell and brimstone that I had to keep moving. I moved, and he stood still.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f765485
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The talkers are rising above the thinkers.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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9551270
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If chained is where you have been, your ams will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.
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personal-history
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6192b25
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Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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65f5afd
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we sang in church " "! Which means
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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c6dcc37
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This is how we celebrate the Day of the Dead in America: by turning up our collars against the scent of earthworms calling us home.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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d8b232c
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Nobody had planted these flowers, I felt sure, nor harvested them either; these were works that the Lord had gone ahead and finished on His own. He must have lacked faith in mankind's follow-through capabilities, on the day he created flowers.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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834a577
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They couldn't close out the whole world, maybe, but they could sure find something on their TV or radio to put scientists or foreigners or whatever they thought he was in a bad light. Truly, they were no better than the city people always looking down on southerners ... If people played their channels right, they could be spared from disagreement for the length of their natural lives. Finally she got it. The need for so many channels.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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474dfb4
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Each food items in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles....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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food-security
environment
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6beed34
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The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earring on sad, rich widows
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sadness
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f4e806a
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In my opinion, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from a greaty height.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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27e8709
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Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f4b501b
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Isn't it awfully sad to thing that's all history amounts to, just following the next stupid fashion?
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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d85c05d
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That is surely childhood's end, when you look at a thing like a rabbit needing skinned and have to say: "Nobody else is going to do this."
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responsibility
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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47c894a
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I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e726127
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Yet I stake a claim, I am here, for I must be somewhere. But only as a child it seems, struggling to understand what every wife and gentleman passing on the street seems to know by rote. Whom to love, whom to castigate.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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bf30893
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The war's [World War II] end has left America with loads of get-up-and-go, and no place to go.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6af03ac
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Even the vendors sitting on stools around the periphery work steadily at connection, nodding at potential buyers, like a sewing machine prodding its needle into the cloth.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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68e169f
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We do have some strong traditions of community in the United States, but it's interesting to me that our traditionally patriotic imagery in this country celebrates the individual, the solo flier, independence. We celebrate Independence Day; we don't celebrate We Desperately Rely on Others Day. Oh, I guess that's Mother's Day [laughter]. It does strike me that our great American mythology tends to celebrate separate achievement and separaten..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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151826b
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I never could figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a big dangerous deal. I mean, we've got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don't we?
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e58e873
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If humanity survives long enough to understand what he really was, they can dig him up and put on display the grandiose depravity of the twentieth century.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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32eed86
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He spoke for an hour on the nonviolent road to independence. The crowd loved it so much they rioted and killed twelve people.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f43db29
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At lunch break [from cheesemaking] I checked out the wildly colorful powder room, where a quote from Alice in Wonderland was painted on the wall:
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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90c95ad
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Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization. -Adah Price, The Poisonwood Bible
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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2d16dac
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She understands all at once, with a small shock, exactly what it is she always needed to tell Harland: being there in person is not the same as watching. You might see things better on television, but you'll never know if you were alive or dead while you watched.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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c1a8cdd
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I'm too fascinated to hide indoors or stay cooped up in our yard. Curiosity killed the cat, I know, but I try to land on my feet.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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b6e520d
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I asked Elsie how much food they needed from outside the community. 'Flour and sugar,' she said, and then thought a bit. 'Sometimes we'll buy pretzels as a splurge.' It crossed my mind that the world's most efficient psychological evaluation would have just one question: Define
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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110a0ba
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One person's picture postcard is someone else's normal.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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d9a5e64
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Most of what's known about religious practices in pre-Hispanic Mexico has come to us through a Catholic parish priest named Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon, one of the few who ever became fluent in the Nahuatl language. He spent the 1620s writing his "Treatise on the Superstitions and Heathen Customs that Today Live Among the Indians Native to This New Spain". He'd originally meant it to be something of a "field guide to the heathens" to help prie..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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bee525d
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Water, in Grace, is an all-or-nothing proposition, like happiness. When you have rain you have more than enough, just as when you're happy and in love and content with your life, you can't remember how you ever could have felt cheated by fate.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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d968aff
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For six years, from age nineteen until I turned twenty-five, I did not sleep uninterrupted through a single night. . . . I felt lucky to get my shoes on the right feet. . . . I moved forward only, thinking each morning anew that we were leaving the worst behind.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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47b72c1
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Symptomatic of this rural-urban identity crisis is our eager embrace of a recently imposed divide: the Red States and the Blue States. That color map comes to us with the suggestion that both coasts are populated by educated civil libertarians, while the vast middle and south are criss-crossed with the studded tracks of ATVs leaving a trail of flying beer cans and rebel yells. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little. But I certainly sense a bit of ..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f36f17a
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the unbearable persistence of hope
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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fb4c369
|
It's frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets rough you fall back on whatever awful think you grew up with.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1a60aaa
|
When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.
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Barbara Kingsolver |