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b4aa5bc
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I hold on to my adopted shore, chanting private vows: wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need. Let me be a good animal today. Let me dance in the waves of my private tide, the habits of survival and love.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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ebd575e
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This household is like a pocketful of coins that jingled together for a time, but now have been slapped on a counter to pay a price. The pocket empties out, the coins venture back into the infinite circulation of currency, separate, invisible, and untraceable.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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80f1e92
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He could construct defeat from any available material and live inside it, but for once Dellarobia didn't go there with him. She was going ahead.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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c03551e
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Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side. Betrayal is a friend I have known a long time, a two-faced goddess looking forward and back with a clear, earnest suspicion of good fortune.
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salvation
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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b41a2a3
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Words were not just words, describing things a person could see. Even if most did not. Maybe they had to know a thing first, to see it.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4fc1cca
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And fairly enough she thought, for that was the way of the world. A road was to be driven upon. The candy dish was there to be eaten, money in the bank got spent, people claimed whatever they could get their hands on. Wasn't that more or less automatic? For a human being to do any less seemed impossible.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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950d24e
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This came as a strange letdown, to see how the game always went to those who knew the rules without understanding the lesson.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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cc7e473
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Move on. Walk forward into the light.
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last-line
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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780ead3
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Hallie didn't believe she was invulnerable. She was never one of those daredevil types; she knew she could get hurt. What I think she meant was that she was lucky to be on her way to Nicaragua. It was the slowest thing to sink into my head, how happy she was. Happy to be leaving. We'd had one time of perfect togetherness in our adult lives, the year when we were both in college in Tucson-her first year, my last-and living together for the f..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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aa43b1f
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I think most people are the same. Until they've gone somewhere.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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79b22ec
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from an entry by her daughter Camille] American culture doesn't allow much room for slow reflection. I watch the working people who are supposed to be my role models getting pushed to go, go, go and take as little vacation time as possible. And then, often, vacations are full of endless activity too, so you might come back from your "break" feeling exhausted ... Whether you prefer to sit on a rock in a peaceful place, or take a wooden spoon..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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b2f415c
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It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4c070b1
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This particular brand of tyrant, though. Yikes," Willa said. "I can't take him seriously. He's going to burn out before the first primary." "Don't count on it. There's a lot of white folks out there hanging on to their God-given right to look down on some other class of people. They feel it slipping away and they're scared. This guy says he's bringing back yesterday, even if he has to use brass knuckles to do it, and drag women back to the ..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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0015e8c
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God speaks for the silent man.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f7510f7
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Eyes can pierce a skull.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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796c23d
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Those first few weeks are an unearthly season. From the outside you remain so ordinary, no one can tell from looking that you have experienced an earthquake of the soul. You've been torn asunder, invested with an ancient, incomprehensible magic. It's the one thing that we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.
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future
dreams
pregnancy
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a3c8e82
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I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living.
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ovid-byron
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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186fec6
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If I kept trying to be what everybody wanted, I'd soon be insipid enough to fit in everywhere.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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759f2a4
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God hates us," I said. "Don't blame God for what ants have to do. We all get hungry. Congolese people are not so different from Congolese ants." "They have to swarm over a village and eat other people alive?" "When they are pushed down long enough they will rise up. If they bite you, they are trying to fix things in the only way they know."
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survival-instinct
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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878a040
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Let's all sing the redneck national anthem: Settle for what you can get.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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d5bf33a
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Do you know, I spent the first half of my life avoiding motherhood and tires, and now I'm counting them as blessings?
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e5d4645
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I'm always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a6ee0b9
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The 2-week delay of her letters had caused me to keep a distrustful eye on Hallie, like a star so many light years away it could have exploded long ago while we still watched its false shine.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6f8409c
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Where you'd be wearing out the knees of your trousers, sir, they just have to go ahead and wear out their knees!
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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1043eaa
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Oh, how can I say this: People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know once again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less ab..
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4c535e0
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Questioning our government's actions does not violate the principles of liberty, equality, and freedom of speech; it exercises them, and by exercise we grow stronger. I have read enough of Thomas Jefferson to feel sure
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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356e263
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What is new is that we know so very much about the world, or at least the part of it that is most picturesquely exploding on any given day, that we're left with a desperate sense that all of it is exploding, all the time. As far as I can tell, that is the intent and purpose of television news. We see so much, understand so little, and are simultaneously told so much about What We Think, as a populace polled minute by minute, that is begins ..
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television
truth
news
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a97d810
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But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation's hopes will die with it, and no cumulative progress is possible for the human will.
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progress
dreams
hope
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a439b6b
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It's a selfish habit. I never learn anything from listening to myself.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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45c0ad8
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Alice hands Annawake a handkerchief. Young people never carry them, she's noticed. They haven't yet learned that heartbreak can catch up to you on any given day.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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dea2229
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Greatness is very boring.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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4409aaf
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After arriving on the ancestral soil I figured out pretty quickly why that [Italian] heritage swamps all competition. It's a culture that sweeps you in, sits you down in the kitchen, and feeds you so well you really don't want to leave.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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c33c2ec
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It was a true conversation. About whether our ancestors had more important lives than we do. And how they've managed to trick us, if they did not.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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6a225ce
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What a knot of history one mistake can become.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e4e0599
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I keep hoping some guy with 'Ron' or 'Andy' stitched on his pocket and a gas pump in his hand will step up and tell me where I'm headed.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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fe3bcf4
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From what he could see she had the legs of a much younger woman. Certainly not what he would have expected in the way of legs.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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f28bbec
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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. There's only one question worth asking now: How do we aim to live with it?
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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e9fd48c
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when the public nerve is aroused, the most impressive capacity of man is his skill for lying.
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lying
the-lacuna
media
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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a1d21e6
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Take one trip overland here and you'll know forever that a road in the jungle is a sweet, flat, impossible dream.
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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da75eb2
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The urge to lie is produced by the contradictions in our lives. We are made to declare love for our country, while it tramples our rights and dignity.
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lying
love-for-country
nationalism
dignity
rights
patriotism
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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fc029ce
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You talk about her as if she is the Notre Dame Cathedral!" "She is. And the Statue of Liberty and Abbey Road and the best burrito of your life. Didn't you know?"
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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7d10470
|
I vow I shall give all my very best books to the underprivileged, once I have read them
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Barbara Kingsolver |
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0995363
|
Soon the maroon-throated howls would echo back from the other trees, father down the beach, until the whole jungle filled with roaring trees. As it was in the beginning, so it is every morning of the world.
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lacuna
trees
monkeys
|
Barbara Kingsolver |
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4eba007
|
I know how people are with their habits of mind... as a husband quits a wife, leaving her with her naked body curled around the emptied-out mine of her womb. I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.
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Barbara Kingsolver |