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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1f7084a | Sylvain] told us that in India it's sometimes considered a purification ritual to go home and spend a year eating everything from one place--ideally, even to grow it yourself. I liked this name for what we had done: a purification ritual, to cultivate health and gratitude. It sounds so much better than wackadoo. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 0f12047 | Our gardening forebears meant watermelon to be the juicy, barefoot taste of a hot summer's end, just as a pumpkin is the trademark fruit of late October. Most of us accept the latter, and limit our jack-o'-latern activities to the proper botanical season. Waiting for a watermelon is harder. It's tempting to reach for melons, red peppers, tomatoes, and other late-summer delights before the summer even arrives. But it's actually possible to w.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 8f173b8 | It's the worst of bad manners to ridicule the small gesture...Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren't trivial. Ultimately they will, or won't, add up to having been the thing that mattered. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| dc0aebe | Everything, she wanted to scream at him, was a question of safety. All human endeavor bent itself to the same lost cause. Being kept inside a pumpkin shell your whole life was no guarantee against getting flung into space. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 2dc9834 | A life was a life. She'd been orphaned at an age to internalize death as poor material for a joke. And likewise, salvation. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 143ce02 | A hundred different paths may lighten the world's load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 28d35d8 | When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 9b7212c | A taste for better stuff is cultivated only through experience. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| c1b3b51 | This is why we do it all over again every year. Fueled only by the stuff they drink from the air and earth, the bush beans fill out their rows, the okra booms, the corn stretches eagerly toward the sky like a toddler reaching up to put on a shirt... We gardeners are right in the middle of this with our weeding and tying up, our mulching and watering, our trained eyes guarding against bugs, groundhogs, and weather damage. But to be honest, t.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| e2b788e | I was struck with how full a silence could be: a Carolina wren sang from the eave of the shed; cedar waxwings carried on whispery bickerings up in the cherry; a mockingbird did an odd jerky dance, as if seized by the bird spirit, out on the driveway. The pea bowl rang like an insistent bell as we tossed in our peas. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 16cdd3d | The view from our garden is spectacular. I thought about people I knew who right at that moment might be plucking chickens, picking strawberries and lettuce, just for us. I felt grateful to the people involved, and the animals also. I don't say this facetiously. I sent my thanks across the county, like any sensible person saying grace before a meal. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 558cfec | On the hill behind her crows flew one by one into the bare trees, arranging their dark blots in the scrim of branches and adding their warnings to the drear sounds of this day. Gone, gone, they rasped. Here was a dead world learning to speak in dissonant, unbearable sounds. | nature crows | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 37e489c | It wasn't all a waste," she told him over and over, holding on. Some things they got right, she was sure of that. The children. And for all the rest they wept, a merged keening that felt bottomless. For the years and years of things that didn't exist, fantasies of flight where there was no flight. Nothing, really, but walking away on your own two feet. She felt tears frozen on her face." | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 824b953 | Sadness is more or less like a head cold--with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 285b51c | This is all going to scare us to death," she said. "You and me. But we're still going to have to do it." | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 9fcfa05 | One red feather for celebration. No one yet has seen it but me. When Miss Dickinson says, "Hope is the thing with feathers," I always think of something round--a ball from one of the games I will never play--stuck all around like a clove-orange sachet with red feathers. I have pictured it many times--Hope!--wondering how I would catch such a thing one-handed, if it did come floating down to me from the sky. Now I find it has fallen already,.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| eeb7504 | Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Adah inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 07d7ab2 | Killing is a culturally loaded term, for most of us inextricably tied up with some version of a command that begins, "Thou shalt not." Every faith has it. And for all but perhaps the Jainists of India, that command is absolutely conditional. We know it does not refer to mosquitoes." | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 71bc699 | A hundred different paths may lighten the world's load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 41f0d83 | It made no sense, a lifespan of a few weeks did not add up to an annual migration of many thousand miles. How did they learn where to go? | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 9dbd16a | 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. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| e99fb17 | It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| b48d73c | Isn't it crazy? Rich people in the United States don't even know how to use money properly. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 23f8b1b | The longer the sauce cooks, the spicier it gets. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 2486c3c | I don't know how you go on, but I really hope you'll keep doing it. That you won't give up esperanza. I thought of that last night. Esperanza is all you get, no second chances. What you have to do is try and think of reasons to stick it out. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 6cca303 | Priests were illegal, saying the mass was illegal, all banned by the Revolution. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 0b3671a | He had a white beard and twinkly blue eyes, and all in all gave the impression of what Santa Claus would look like if he'd converted to Christian and gone without a good meal sine last Christmas. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| f8454d8 | The way he talked sounded part Yankee, part foreign, like one of those friendly Irish policeman in the old movies: "Ouch, mind you!" | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| c5c6cb1 | is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 89eca73 | Let's go take a walk down to the blue hole. You need to look at some water. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| b471ac1 | Well, but it's criminal negligence, really. These kids have to grow up and run things. Larger things than a ball field, I mean. What kind of world will they really be able to make? | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| d021b78 | We felt tired to our bones but anointed by life in a durable, companionable way, for at least the present moment. We the living take every step in tandem with death, whether we can see that or not. We bear it by the grace of friendship, good mels, and if we need them, talking turkey heads. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| a323f9e | if you look hard enough you can always see reasons, but you'll go crazy if you think it's all punishment for your sins. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 3de8a21 | Until that morning when we all went to the riverbank, I still believed Mother would take Leah, not me. Leah who, even in her malarial stupor, rushed forward to crouch with the battery in the canoe and counter its odd tilt. I was outshone was usual by her heroism. But as we watched that pirogue drift away across the Kwenge, Mother gripped my hand so tightly I understood that I had been chosen. She would drag me out of Africa if it was her la.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| e421a75 | palindrome. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| df93612 | I'm beginning at least to notice when I'm consuming the United Nations of edible plants and animals all in one seating. (Or the WTO, is more like it.) On a winter's day not long ago I was served a sumptuous meal like this, finished off with a dessert of raspberries. Because they only grow in temperate zones, not the tropics, these would have come from somewhere deep in the Southern Hemisphere. I was amazed that such small, eminently bruisab.. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| ebc9679 | You just read your books and go on a hundred miles away, You ignore me. | reading books | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| c127ab8 | Moths must fly to his flame and perish gladly. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| a367788 | might call it a great passion. When the true name of what we're dealing with is greed, or lust. We all have the special talent of believing in a falsehood, and believing it devoutly, when we want it to be true. | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 62807e3 | I've seen many a small life meet its doom at the end of a beak in our yard, not just beetles and worms but salamanders and wild-eyed frogs. (The "free-range vegetarian hens" testimony on an egg-carton label is perjury, unless someone's trained them with little shock collars.)" | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| 01e569e | A dog can't think that much about what he's doing, he just does what feels right. | instinct | Barbara Kingsolver | |
| 33f049a | For God's sake, man," Ovid nearly shouted, "the damn globe is catching fire, and the islands are drowning. The evidence is staring them in the face." | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| ac8bec7 | Were the beaux less generous over time? Her assets less marketable? If she had lived to be old, would she have resided in a teacup, to be sipped at intervals beneath some gray moustache? | Barbara Kingsolver | ||
| f76587f | benzene running through a school basement. It's interesting that penny-pinching is an accepted defense for toxic food habits, when frugality so rarely rules other consumer domains. The majority of Americans buy bottled drinking water, for example, even though water runs from the faucets at home for a fraction of the cost, and government quality standards are stricter for tap water than for bottled. At any income level, we can be relied upon.. | Barbara Kingsolver |