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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| dea2229 | Greatness is very boring. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 4409aaf | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| c33c2ec | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 6a225ce | What a knot of history one mistake can become. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| e4e0599 | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| fe3bcf4 | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| f28bbec | 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? | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| e9fd48c | when the public nerve is aroused, the most impressive capacity of man is his skill for lying. | lying the-lacuna media | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| a1d21e6 | Take one trip overland here and you'll know forever that a road in the jungle is a sweet, flat, impossible dream. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| da75eb2 | 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. | lying love-for-country nationalism dignity rights patriotism | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| fc029ce | 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?" | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 7d10470 | I vow I shall give all my very best books to the underprivileged, once I have read them | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 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. | lacuna trees monkeys | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 6427763 | My prior experience with young men was to hear them swear 'Christ almighty in the craphouse!' at any dress with too many buttons. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 351efe8 | But a Congolese life is like the useless Congolese bill, which you can pile by the fistful or the bucketful into a merchant's hand, and still not purchase a single banana. It's dawning on me that I live among men and women who've simply always understood their whole existence is worth less than a banana to most white people. I see it in their eyes when they glance up at me. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 1c17e5b | Shoes, then, sliding me across the floor to greet the day. Dreaming of coffee. I'm afraid I didn't miss the physical presence of my husband in his absences as much as I missed coffee. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| c0954de | Well, the ancients might not have been very heroic. Most of them were probably like Mother, crouched somewhere trying to work out how to make fake jawbone jewelry that would look like the real thing. | heroes history people | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| fd9398e | I was a skeleton with flesh and clothes and thoughts. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| f8322db | The room looks as if a giant dog after a large lunch of food, socks, paints, trousers and pencils, walked into that room and vomited everywhere. | humour | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 6c2ddb9 | penitence is more attainable than permission. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| c0cebcd | Summer's heat had never really arrived, nor the cold in it's turn, and everything living now seemed to yearn for sun with the anguish of the unloved. The world of sensible seasons had come undone. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| ff7d850 | There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, There now, hang on, you'll get over it. Sadness is more or less like a head cold--with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 4dbc6c3 | The wonder to me now is that I thought my life worth saving...Desperate to save myself in a river of people saving themselves. And if they chanced to look down and see me struggling underneath them, they saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| cb7cffa | And somehow Hallie thrived anyway--the blossom of our family, like one of those miraculous fruit trees that taps into an invisible vein of nurture and bears radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on living. In Grace, in the old days, when people found one of those in their orchard they called it the semilla besada--the seed that got kissed. Sometimes you'd run across one that people had come to, and returned to, in hop.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 70d1cfb | That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that's how they do it here. Maybe he's been in Africa so long he's forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it's called Monotony. | marriage monogamy | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| a9d1b3a | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 68c4b43 | A story is like a painting, Soli. It doesn't have to look like what you see out the window. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| e8ee19b | The last generation's worst fears became the next one's B-grade entertainment. | generations | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| ce5cf98 | I was occupied so entirely by each day, I felt detached from anything so large as a month or a year. History didn't cross my mind. Now it does. Now I know, whatever your burdens, to hold yourself apart from the lot of more powerful men is an illusion. On that awful day in January 1961, Lumumba paid with a life and so did I. On the wings of an owl the fallen Congo came to haunt even our little family, we messengers of goodwill adrift on a se.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 4f26869 | Having children was not like people said. Forget training them in your footsteps; the minute they put down the teething ring and found the Internet, you were useless as a source of anything but shoes and a winter coat. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 6ddf32f | People automatically estimate a mom's IQ at around her children's ages, maybe dividing by the number of kids, rounding up to the nearest pajama size. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 0357e72 | the twins too, they've never cared a hoot what they looked like. They spent so much time staring at each other's faces before they were born they can go the rest of their lives passing up mirrors without a glance. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| ecc5124 | She looked over the bins of tinselly junk and felt despair, trying to find one single thing that wouldn't fall apart before you got it home. Maybe her father was lucky to die young with his pride of craftsmanship intact. What would he make of this world? Realistically, it probably wasn't slave children, but there had to be armies of factory workers making this slapdash stuff, underpaid people cranking out things for underpaid people to buy .. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 81189b9 | Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly. | food | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| ccb1761 | Sept 15 1930 at the independence festival of the school of cretins..."At the head of the table by the bowl of pomegranates, Senora Bartolome had put a note: Take only one, our Lord Jesus is watching!. A second note appeared at the foot of the table beside the sugared almonds: Take all you want, Jesus is looking at the pomegranates." | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| a2180fd | The effect is both domestic and wild, equal parts geometric and chaotic. It's the visual signature of small, diversified farms that creates the picture-postcard landscape here, along with its celebrated gastronomic one. Couldn't Americans learn to love landscapes like these around our cities, treasuring them not just gastronomically but aesthetically, instead of giving everything over to suburban development? Can we only love agriculture on.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| f40b5e9 | On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing; all animals kill to survive, and we are animals. The lion kills the baboon, the baboon kills fat grasshoppers. The elephant tears up living trees, dragging their precious roots from the dirt they love....And we, even if we had no meat or even grass to gnaw, still boil our water to kill the invisible creatures that would like to kill us first. And swallow q.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 818d4ae | She married him two years ago for love, or so she thought, and he's a good enough man but a devotee of household silence. His idea of marriage is to spray WD-40 on anything that squeaks. ... The quiet only subsides when Harland sleeps and his tonsils make up for lost time. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 945ba54 | When I was Turtle's age I had never had anyone or anything important taken from me. I still hadn't. Maybe I hadn't started out with a whole lot, but pretty nearly all of it was still with me. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| e34cdfb | Even the bells from the churches have a conversation, all ringing at once. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 2f66e7d | Every family's its own trip to China. | relations | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| bf8bc8b | When something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can. | love inspirational extraordinary taking-chances home | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 0519bfc | I was so depressed I stopped using hair spray for three weeks. | Barbara Kingsolver |