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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3477545 | Now, see, that's why everybody wants Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy.' Dovey's phone buzzed, and she laughed, ignoring it. 'The trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn't agree with you, all that's left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho. | friends human-connection social-media online internet | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| b7430b2 | One way of surviving heartache is to stay busy. Making something right in at least one tiny corner of the vast house of wrongs... | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| fca15eb | The backs of his hands remind him of paper burning in the fireplace, the moment the taut membrane goes slack into a thousand wrinkles, just before it withers to ash and air. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 60f4fa9 | She's got a mean streak in her," I told him. "If you're unlucky enough to get ahold of a dog like that, you give it away to somebody with a big farm. I don't know what you do about a neighbor." Estevan shrugged. "I understand," he said. "Really, I don't think she knew what she was saying, about how the woman and kid who got shot must have been drug dealers or whatever." "Oh, I believe she did. This is how Americans think." He was looking at.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 18e4b7e | A mother's body remembers her babies--the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has its own entreaties to body and soul. It's the last one, though, that overtakes you. I can't dare say I loved the others less, but my first three were all babies at once, and motherhood dismayed me entirely. The twins came just as Rachel was learning to walk. What came next I hardly remember, whole years when I battled thro.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| cae76d8 | Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittlebush in a dry wind. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| b141c32 | There will never be another Frida. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 723988d | Michael Pollan: "The industrialization--and dehumanization--of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do." U.S. consumers may take our pick of reasons to be wary of the resulting product: growth hormones, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, unhealthy cholesterol composition, deadly E. coli strains, fuel consumpt.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 349178a | you always write about individualism vs. community, and that you see independence as stupidity and instead celebrate dependency. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 681087d | Twenty pounds of tomatoes will cook down into a pot of tomato sauce that fits into five one-quart freezer boxes, good for one family meal each. (Be warned, the fragrance of your kitchen will cause innocent bystanders to want to marry you.) | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| f0ec5d9 | My "Kentucky NCAA Champions" shirt was by now so bloodstained, you would think I had worn it to a North Carolina game. Also, I had feathers sticking to my hair." | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| a2cc18d | What we suffered in our lives we went through together, but somehow we came out different doors, on different ground levels. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 314b2f2 | Engineered genes don't play by the rules that have organized life for three billion years (or, if you prefer, 4,004). And in this case, winning means loser takes all. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 3249d0f | from an entry by her daughter Camille] Organic produce actually delivers more nutritional bang for the buck. These fruits and vegetables are tougher creatures than those labeled "conventional," precisely because they've had to fight off predators themselves." | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| e1962dd | from an entry by her daughter Camille] If nobody is spritzing chemicals on the predators, all a plant can do is toughen up by manufacturing its own disease/pest-fighting compounds. That's why organic produce shows significantly higher levels of antioxidants than conventional--these nutritious compounds evolved in the plant not for our health, but for the plant's. Several studies, including research done by Allison Byrum of the American Chem.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| af495d4 | I don't know," Magda says, "Seems like that's just how it is with you and me. We're like islands on the moon." | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| ece73a7 | A storm was coming up from the south, moving slowly. It looked something like a huge blue-gray shower curtain being drawn along by the hand of God. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 094ad23 | Heroes may be less than heroic, while the common man saves the day. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 8c00c1f | You can fool history sometimes, but you can't fool the memory of your intimates. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| d325438 | Our journey was to be a great enterprise of balance. My father, of course, was bringing the Word of God--which fortunately weighs nothing at all. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| f87a30c | Both vitamin pills and vegetables are loaded with essential nutrients, but not in the same combinations. Spinach is a good source of both vitamin C and iron. As it happens, vitamin C boosts iron absorption, allowing the body to take in more of it than if the mineral were introduced alone. When I first started studying nutrition, I became fascinated with these coincidences, realizing of course they're not coincidences. Human bodies and their.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 6e71907 | The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. What I want is almost so simple I can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 69ca8e0 | south, moving slowly. It looked something like a huge blue-gray shower curtain being drawn along by the hand of God. You could just barely see through it, enough to make | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 4213215 | Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're just particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text. Set down a platter of country ham in front of a rabbi, an imam, and a Buddhist monk, and you may have just .. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 51d7553 | Eating is a genuine need, continuous from our first day to our last, amounting over time to our most significant statement of what we are made of and what we have chosen to make of our connection to home ground. | earth sustainable ethics eating food | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 33c8a83 | One day we came home from some errands to find a grocery sack of them hanging on our mailbox. The perpetrator, of course, was nowhere in sight. "Wow," we all said--"what a good idea!" Garrison Keillor says July is the only time of year when country people lock our cars in the church parking lot, so people won't put squash on the front seat. I used to think that was a joke." | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 4a1e8c5 | The rule of fishes is the same as the rule of people: if the shark comes, they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten. They share a single jumpy heart that drives them to move all together, running away from danger just before it arrives. Somehow they know. Underneath | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 1821941 | There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad...Sadness is more or less like a head cold -- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 7ae8125 | I shrugged. "I saw a Star Trek episode one time that was along those lines. All the women on this whole planet end up naked. I can't remember exactly, but I think Captain Kirk gets turned into a pipe wrench." | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 99cabd7 | The larger the corporation, the more distant its motives are apt to be from the original spirit of organic farming--and the farther the products will likely be shipped to buyers who will smile at the happy farm picture on the package, and never be the wiser. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| b7d6689 | We're genetically predisposed toward certain behaviors that we've collectively decided are unhelpful; adultery and racism are possible examples. With reasonable success, we mitigate those impulses through civil codes, religious rituals, maternal warnings--the whole bag of tricks we call culture. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 4b5d5dc | But a spontaneous traveler inevitably will end up with the tummy gauge suddenly on empty, in some place where cuisine is not really the point: a museum cafeteria, or late-night snack bar across from the concert hall. Eating establishments where cuisine isn't the point--is that a strange notion? | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 14a8d3a | Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 795d535 | Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 00cc584 | She never says gracias because life is made of survival not grace, she says, and servants are paid to bring what they're asked. | gracias thanks grace survival servants | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 4077400 | Many other raw food products--notably poultry from CAFOs--typically carry a much higher threat to human health in terms of pathogen load, and yet the government trusts us to render it safe in our own humble kitchens. But it's easy to see how impossibly strict milk rules might gratify industry lobbyists, by eliminating competition from family producers. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| e39f0a1 | The difference is an objective phenomenon of soil science; what we call "soil" is a community of living, mostly microscopic organisms in a nutrient matrix. Organic farming, by definition, enhances the soil's living and nonliving components. Modern conventional farming is an efficient reduction of that process that adds back just a few crucial nutrients of the many that are removed each year when biomass is harvested ... Chemicals that steri.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 956d1cf | Don't you miss it, any of it?' ... 'I couldn't say.' She thought about it. 'Not cars or electric lights, not movies. Books I can get if I ask. But walking around in a library, putting my hands on books I never knew about, that I miss. Any thing else, I don't know. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 8fe42a1 | I tried to recall where I had been at sunup that day. It was in St. Louis, Missouri, where they have that giant McDonald's thing towering over the city, | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| ccc4b02 | For a long time he frowned at the brick path that lay between himself and the bird, and then he let go of the wall. He took one step and then more, buoyed up by some impossible antigravity. After two steps the hummingbird was gone, but Nicholas still headed for the air it had occupied, his hands grasping at vapour. It was as if an invisible balloon floated above him, tied to his overall strap, dragging him along from above. He swayed and sw.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| f77e232 | What other man, ever again, would just do as she commanded, no questions asked? She felt overwhelmed with love and loss and nostalgia for this bond that was not even yet in her past, | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 44b6a68 | Our bodies aren't adapted to absorb big loads of nutrients all at once (many supplements surpass RDA values by 200 percent or more), but tiny quantities of them in combinations--exactly as they occur in plants. Eating a wide variety of different plant chemicals is a very good idea, according to research from the American Society for Nutritional Sciences. You don't have to be a chemist, but color vision helps. By eating plant foods in all di.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 2b0bbbd | Most people no longer believe that buying sneakers made in Asian sweatshops is a kindness to those child laborers. Farming is similar. In every country on earth, the most human scenario for farmers is likely to be feeding those who live nearby--if international markets would allow them to do it. Food transport has become a bizarre and profitable economic equation that's no longer really about feeding anyone ... If you care about farmers, le.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| ad3a31c | from an excerpt by her daughter Camille] Living on the land that has grown my food gives me a sense of security I'm lucky to have. Feeling safe isn't so easy for people my age, who face odious threats like global warming, overpopulation, and chemical warfare in our future. But even as the world runs out of fuel and the ice caps melt, I will know the real sources of my sustenance. My college education may or may not land me a good job down t.. | Barbara Kingsolver |