“It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life... Maybe being perfectly happy is not really the point. Maybe that is only some modern American dream of the point, while the truer measure of humanity is the distance we must travel in our lives, time and again, "twixt two extremes of passion--joy and grief," as Shakespeare put it. However much I've lost, what remains to me is that I can still speak to name the things I love. And I can look for safety in giving myself away to the world's least losable things.”
“It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life... Maybe being perfectly happy is not really the point. Maybe that is only some modern American dream of the point, while the truer measure of humanity is the distance we must travel in our lives, time and again, "twixt two extremes of passion--joy and grief," as Shakespeare put it. However much I've lost, what remains to me is that I can still speak to name the things I love. And I can look for safety in giving myself away to the world's least losable things.”
Barbara Kingsolver
“Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining?”
Barbara Kingsolver“Outside in the sun the Holy Mother stood on her pedestal in the garden, sorry but unsympathetic. The usual position of mothers.”
Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna“...when the public nerve is aroused, the most impressive capacity of man is his skill for lying.”
Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna“Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.”
Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna“Most of them don't know what communism is, could not pick it out of a lineup. They only know what anticommunism is. The two are practically unrelated.”
Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna“In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again(15).”
Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson“Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.”
Barbara Kingsolver“You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm.”
Barbara Kingsolver“It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.”
Barbara Kingsolver“Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”
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