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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5fe0d1b | To stomp about the world ignoring cultural differences is arrogant, to be sure, but perhaps there is another kind of arrogance in the presumption that we may ever really build a faultless bridge from one shore to another, or even know where the mist has ceded to landfall. | diplomacy nations peace world | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| cc4fa6f | She kept her ears permanently tuned to the chicken voices outside, so knew immediately when a coyote had crept into the yard, and barreled screaming for the front door before the rest of us had a clue. (I don't know about the coyote, but I nearly needed CPR.) These hens owed their lives and eggs to Lily, there was no question. | coyote cpr humor | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| bf70882 | When the spirit passed through him he groaned, throwing body and soul into his weekly purge. The "Amen enema", as I call it. My palindrome for the Reverend." | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 3bb8087 | There is not justice in this world. Father, forgive me wherever you are, but this world has brought one vile abomination after another down on the heads of the gentle, and I'll not live to see the meek inherit anything. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 2ce61f1 | Simple remedies for dire situations, that's the lesson. In a falling elevator, try to climb up on the person nearby so their body will cushion your landing. Or in a crowded theater when everybody's hightailing it for the fire exit, stick your elbows hard into the ribs of your neighbors to wedge yourself in, then pick up your feet so you won't get trampled. That is how people frequently lose their lives in a riot: somebody steps on your heel.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| d88eafe | If a friend had a coronary scare and finally started exercising three days a week, who would hound him about the other four days? It's the worst of bad manners--and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society--to ridicule the small gesture. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 1b50595 | In Congo, a slashed jungle quickly becomes a field of flowers, and scars become the ornaments of a particular face. Call it oppression, complicity, stupefaction, call it what you like, it doesn't matter. Africa swallowed the conqueror's music and sang a new song of her own. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 469aa91 | If you ask me, that's reason enough to keep a kitchen at the center of a family's life, as a place to understand favorite foods as processes, not just products. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| fe3ada1 | What kind of weirdo makes cheese? It's too hard to imagine, too homespun, too something. We're so alienated from the creation of even ordinary things we eat or use, each one seems to need its own public relations team to calm the American subservience to hurry and bring us back around to doing a thing ourselves, at home. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| ccfef7b | Marketing jingles from every angle lure patrons to turn our backs on our locally owned stores, restaurants, and farms. And nobody considers that unpatriotic. This appears to aggravate Tod Murphy. "We have the illusion of consumer freedom, but we've sacrificed our community life for the pleasure of purchasing lots of cheap stuff. Making and moving all that stuff can be so destructive: child labor in foreign lands, acid rain in the Northeast,.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 57b51a5 | The density of the butterflies in the air now gave her a sense of being underwater, plunged into a deep pond among bright fishes. | butterflies nature | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 86c9146 | on her Amish friends]I do know this family has borne losses and grief, just like the rest of us. But if they are generally content, must such a life inevitably be dismissed as mythical, or else merely quaint? ... It sounds like a community type that went extinct a generation ago. But it didn't, not completely. If a self-sufficient farming community has survived here, it remains a possibility elsewhere. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 43adca7 | Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 6e7b115 | Today at the Melchor market, a fantastical sight. A servant girl with a birdcage on her back, full of birds. She wore her blue shawl wrapped around the cage and tied in front to hold it. The willow cage must have been very light because she was not bent over, yet it towered over her head, with turrets like a Japanese pagoda. And full of birds: green and yellow, flapping about like dreams trying to escape from a skull. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 0ae5ae2 | You make cheese yourself," she repeated reverently. "You are a real housewife." It has taken me decades to get here, but I took that as a compliment." | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 83e43b1 | Respecting the dignity of a spectacular food means enjoying it at its best. Europeans celebrate the short season of abundant asparagus as a form of holiday. In the Netherlands the first cutting coincides with Father's Day, on which restaurants may feature all-asparagus menus and hand out neckties decorated with asparagus spears. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| b13f777 | According to Indian crop ecologist Vandana Shiva, humans have eaten some 80,000 plant species in our history. After recent precipitous changes, three-quarters of all human food now comes from just eight species, with the field quickly narrowing down to genetically modified corn, soy, and canola. If woodpeckers and pandas enjoy celebrity status on the endangered-species list (dubious though such fame may be), food crops are the forgotten com.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 3a2f228 | I think maybe it is true that the idle mind is the Devil's workshop. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| dc1333b | You can't save the whales by eating whales, but paradoxically, you can help save rare, domesticated foods by eating them. They're kept alive by gardeners who have a taste for them, and farmers who know they'll be able to sell them. The consumer becomes a link in this conservation chain by seeking out the places where heirloom vegetables are sold, taking them home, whacking them up with knives, and learning to incorporate their exceptional t.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 3a49764 | It's a funny thing to complain about, but most of America is perfectly devoid of smells. I must have noticed it before, but this last time back I felt it as an impairment. For weeks after we arrived I kept rubbing my eyes, thinking I was losing my sight or maybe my hearing. But it was the sense of smell that was gone. Even in the grocery store, surrounded in one aisle by more kinds of food than will ever be known in a Congolese lifetime, th.. | ignorance | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 9471688 | How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don't respect his work? | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 05fcba8 | I'd forgotten how trees full of bird sounds made you sense the world differently: that life didn't just stop at eye level. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 4c9b551 | All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 31d16b0 | On Sunday morning I put on jeans, changed into a denim dress, then back into jeans again, feeling stupid. I can get into a mood where I annoy myself to no end. At the moment when I got completely fed up and stopped caring, I had on jeans and a white cotton shirt and silver earrings, so that's what I wore. And yes, I'll admit it, nice underwear. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 732d998 | Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| e51ed4a | What there is in this world, I think, is a tendency for human errors to level themselves like water throughout their sphere of influence. That's pretty much the whole of what I can say, looking back. There's the possibility of balance. Unbearable burdens that the world somehow does bear with a certain grace. | human-error | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 172586d | All that hurry can blur the truth that life is a zero-sum equation. Every minute I save will get used on something else, possibly no more sublime than staring at the newel post trying to remember what I just ran upstairs for. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| e476f62 | They count that as your birthday -- the day your mother gets up." "Not the day you were born?" Not the day you came out. They count the mother getting better as all part of the birth." | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 6a5b2d2 | If you can't live by the laws the LORD God made for the world, they'll go into effect regardless. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 05c84a4 | the houses all seemed a little senile, with arthritc hinges and window screens hanging at embarrassing angles. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| b53b4ba | She climbs down and pours half an inch of Jim Beam into a Bengals mug that came free with a tank of gas. Alice would just as soon get her teeth cleaned as watch the Bengals. That's the price of staying around when your heart's not in it, she thinks. You get to be cheerleader for a sport you never chose. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| b2d4517 | Here comes Moses tromping down off Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 9731006 | Oh, man, don't get me started on the subject of childhood brainwash. I hate that. Every fairy story, every Disney movie, every plot with animals in it, the bad guy is always the top carnivore. Wolf, grizzly, anaconda, Tyrannosaurus rex. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 2c08088 | It is impossible to describe the shock of return. I recall that I stood for the longest time staring at a neatly painted yellow line on a neatly formed cement curb. Yellow yellow line line. I pondered the human industry, the paint, the cement truck and concrete forms, all the resources that had gone into that one curb. For what? I could not quite think of the answer. So that no car would park there? Are there so many cars that America must .. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 2c4d923 | A million dead butterflies, she said. Sorry as hell they ever landed here. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 07423de | We can't know what we haven't been taught | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 976ad87 | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 2e71a96 | I'll never get over my grappling for balance, never stop believing life is going to be , the minute we can clear up all these mistakes of the temporarily misguided. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| f1512a1 | Carlo is safe because I don't really love him that much. If he stopped wanting me around one day, it wouldn't be so terrible. I wouldn't die. Hallie, I realize how that sounds. I feel small and ridiculous and hemmed in on every side by the need to be safe. All I want is to be like you, to walk into a country of chickens and land mines and call that home, and have it be home. How do you just charge ahead, always doing the right thing, even i.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| d145fbf | Sometimes that happens. Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them," she said. "It works out." -- | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 00cb376 | so he just stood there brewing like a coffeepot. Only with a coffeepot you know exactly what's going to come out of it. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 3d9ed09 | I had just dropped out of medicine in my first year of residency, a few months shy of becoming a licensed M.D. I'd discovered there was something serious, mainly a matter of nerve and perhaps empathy, that stood in my way. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 247fb8e | always tried to be positive with her, although I'd learned | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 64d4a81 | When he marched to the altar, all the women in smart hats leaned away from the aisle, their long strands of pearls all swaying to one side as if the deck of a ship listed beneath them. | Barbara Kingsolver |