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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5e2b877 | She looked like Cinderella in reverse, stepped out from her life at the ball for a day of misery among the ashes. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 478fdbb | How would you even begin to make a hush puppy, what in the world was in one? Nothing to do with a puppy, surely. Garnett had long known, though he didn't much like to admit it, that God's world and the better part of daily life were full of mysteries known only to women. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| d6459d7 | Anatole has been explaining to me the native system of government. He says the business of throwing pebbles into bowls with the most pebbles winning an election--that was Belgium's idea of fair play, but to people here it was peculiar. To the Congolese (including Anatole himself, he confessed) it seems odd that if one man gets fifty votes and the other gets forty-nine, the first one wins altogether and the second one plumb loses. That means.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| a42e94b | Which makes you wonder, are they really speaking real words or do little kids just start out naturally understanding each other before the prime of life sets in? | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| f98ff6b | So Noah cursed all Ham's children to be slaves forever and ever. That's how come them to turn out dark | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 3e3ecfe | The clock gulps softly, eating second whole while she waits... | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| fa0487d | A journalist's job is to collect information," Ovid said to Pete. "Nope," Pete said. "That's what we do. It's not what they do." Dellarobia was unready to be pushed out of the conversation just like that. "Then what do you think the news people drive their Jeeps all the way out here for?" "To shore up the prevailing view of their audience and sponsors." "Pete takes a dim view of his fellow humans," Ovid said. "He prefers insects. Della.. | media news | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 4ca095b | We were not made for this killing thing, I swear. Back up. Big mistake. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 3a8ed67 | Already? How can this be?" I would ask, shattered by the terrible truth that I needed a three-ring binder and some #2 pencils. It's not that school was a bad thing. Summer was just so much better." | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 8105cbb | This was a living flow, like a pulse through veins, with the cells bursting and renewing themselves as they went. The sudden vision filled her with strong emotions that embarrassed her, for fear of breaking into sobs as she had in front of her in-laws that day when the butterflies enveloped her. How was that even normal, to cry over insects? | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 0885d88 | Being a peacock is not the only way to hide yourself, Frida. A pigeon can hide. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 8c05755 | Think of all the duties that were perfectly obvious to Paul or Matthew in that old Arabian desert that are pure nonsense to us now. All that foot washing, for example. Was it really for God's glory or just to keep the sand out of the house? | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 9f9d4b4 | Modern US consumers now get to taste less than 1 percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago. Those old-timers now lurk only in backyard gardens and on farms that specialize in direct sales--if they survive at all. Many heirlooms have been lost entirely. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| e6575fe | GM [genetically modified] plants are virtually everywhere in the US food chain, but don't have to be labeled, and aren't. Industry lobbyists intend to keep it that way. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| cb94ff1 | Why does a person spend money on a stamp to spout bile at a stranger? | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| fa21c91 | War is the supreme mathematics problem. It strains our skulls, yet we work out the sums, believing we have pressed the most monstrous quantities into a balanced equation | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| e1fa477 | You knew me well enough to find me here,' she said. And his scent burst onto her brain like a rain of lights, and his voice reached across the distance without words: 'I've always known you that well.' He wrapped her in his softness, touched her face with the movement of trees and the odor of wild water over stones, dissolving her need in the confidence of his embrace. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 58bf2d4 | Every few weeks I get a letter from Leopoldville, which holds me on track. My heart races when I see the long blue envelope in a sister's hand, delivered to me under her sleeve as if a man himself were inside. And, oh, he is! Still sweet and bitter and wise and, best of all, still alive. I squeal, I can't help it, and run outside to the courtyard to taste him in private like a cat with a stolen pullet. I lean my face against the cool wall a.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 7df4d83 | I almost never respect men. They're like flowers -- all show, a lot of color and lust. You pick them and throw them on the ground. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 51c944f | Remember how we use to pray to get invited to birthday parties? And they only asked us because we were so grateful we'd do anything, stay late and help the mothers wash the cake pans. I'm still that girl, flattered to death if somebody wants me around. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| b8a6f6d | A disappointed-looking Jesus eyed her from the wall...Look, look, her steps called out, here is a red headed sinner on the move. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 5ab9086 | The color brown, I realized, is anything but nondescript. It comes in as many hues as there are colors of earth, with is commonly presumed infinite. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| a066235 | Cub had puffed up like a rooster when the article came out, taking it in to show the guys at the gravel company. He was impressed with all the celebrity in equal measure, the type of kid who had cut out pictures of football players, Jesus, and America's Most Wanted to tape on his bedroom wall. He'd confessed to having cried in sixth grade when he learned that superheroes weren't real. Dellarobia was his Wonder Woman. But Hester seemed incen.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| f0c1816 | Parenting is something that happens mostly while you're thinking of something else. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 65cd6ee | I've just fallen on some bad luck and landed jelly side down. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| eae2971 | She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four. | youth | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 6822adb | Do not expect God's protection in places beyond God's dominion. It will only make you feel punished. I'm warning you. When things go badly, you will blame yourself. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 5560c1b | In almost thirty years of walking around on the grass of the world, she couldn't recall having spent two minutes alone with a butterfly. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 22c3114 | I understood that the terror of my recurring dream was not about losing just vision, but the whole of myself, whatever that was. What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 9f4aa16 | How could two people get the same set of parts and make such different constructions? But then, there was rising. That had to be taken into account. What could a doormat rear but a pair of boots? | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| c89e649 | So she was what Hester called a 911 Christian: in the event of an emergency, call the Lord. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 30a6f23 | You don't ask questions of an attic | profound telling | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 52b0e9a | The best artifact was the calendar of the ancients, a great carved piece of stone as big as a kitchen, circular, bolted to the wall like a giant clock. In the center was an angry face looking out, as if he'd come through that stone from some other place to have a look at us, and not very pleased about it. | smilie | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 82e8b78 | No one seemed to realize calculating sums requires only the most basic machinery and good concentration. Poetry is far more difficult. And palindromes, with their perfect, satisfying taste: Draw a level award! Yet it is always the thin gray grocery sums that make an impression. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 0e99521 | My future was mapped in negatives. Next year, I could be anywhere but here. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 4fb88fd | Like Daniel she enteres the lions' den, but lacking Daniel's pure and unblemished soul, Ada is spiced with the flavors of vice that make for a tasty meal. Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 443a47a | I could see that the whole idea and business of Childhood was nothing guaranteed. It seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown-up life like a frill on a dress. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 06be676 | I looked hard out the window and understood suddenly that what I saw was full of color. A watercolor wash of summer light lay on the Catalina Mountains. The end of a depression is that clear: it's as if you have been living underwater, but never realized it until you came up for air. | depression | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 5ccb281 | Sometimes the past can vanish. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| fe707ba | But the pill did nothing, probably expired like everything else on the premises. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 37fec17 | Her name, he says like the Lord's taken in vain. Sometimes he says "Mexico," and the word has nothing in it at all. A wall with no colors painted on it." | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 4864e2f | mountains. They stand at every view, like a mother offering a blanket in which to wrap everyday life and shelter it from useless. dreads. In june they are walls of white rhodendron blossom. In autumn the forests set themselves afflame with color. Even winter has its icy charms. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 3dfbac7 | And all of us with our closed eyes smelled the frangipani blossoms in the big rectangles of open wall, flowers so sweet they conjure up sin or heaven, depending on which way you are headed. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 074f568 | What Aunt Tess loved to say was: "Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up your pace." | Barbara Kingsolver |