1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3190
3191
3192
3193
3194
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f4b501b | Isn't it awfully sad to thing that's all history amounts to, just following the next stupid fashion? | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| d85c05d | 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." | responsibility | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 47c894a | I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| e726127 | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| bf30893 | The war's [World War II] end has left America with loads of get-up-and-go, and no place to go. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 6af03ac | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 68e169f | 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.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 151826b | 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? | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| e58e873 | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 32eed86 | He spoke for an hour on the nonviolent road to independence. The crowd loved it so much they rioted and killed twelve people. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| f43db29 | 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: | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 90c95ad | Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization. -Adah Price, The Poisonwood Bible | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 2d16dac | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| c1a8cdd | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| b6e520d | 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 | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 110a0ba | One person's picture postcard is someone else's normal. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| d9a5e64 | 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.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| bee525d | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| d968aff | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 47b72c1 | 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 .. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| f36f17a | the unbearable persistence of hope | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| fb4c369 | It's frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets rough you fall back on whatever awful think you grew up with. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 1a60aaa | When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| b4aa5bc | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| ebd575e | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 80f1e92 | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| c03551e | 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. | salvation | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| b41a2a3 | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 4fc1cca | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 950d24e | This came as a strange letdown, to see how the game always went to those who knew the rules without understanding the lesson. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| cc7e473 | Move on. Walk forward into the light. | last-line | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 780ead3 | 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.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| aa43b1f | I think most people are the same. Until they've gone somewhere. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 79b22ec | 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.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| b2f415c | It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 4c070b1 | 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 .. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 0015e8c | God speaks for the silent man. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| f7510f7 | Eyes can pierce a skull. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 796c23d | 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. | dreams future pregnancy | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| a3c8e82 | 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. | ovid-byron | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 186fec6 | If I kept trying to be what everybody wanted, I'd soon be insipid enough to fit in everywhere. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 759f2a4 | 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." | survival-instinct | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 878a040 | Let's all sing the redneck national anthem: Settle for what you can get. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| df33d6f | Many of us have moments of weakness when we feel as if our cravings have taken us captive or left us out of control. Sometimes they leave our faith flavorless because we are craving what used to be or what we wish could be. The Bible tells us there is a season for everything, and if we don't learn to taste each season as it is served, we will end up missing special moments and those life lessons we need to draw closer to God. I love the sea.. | Sheri Rose Shepherd |