03UndatedIf the Lord hasn't got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that's his business.Barbara Kingsolver / quote ↗
04UndatedScience doesn't tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.Barbara Kingsolver / quote ↗
06UndatedI attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.Barbara Kingsolver / quote ↗
09UndatedThere is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.Barbara Kingsolver / quote ↗
10UndatedThe friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.Barbara Kingsolver / quote ↗
12UndatedYour blood for mine. If not these, then those. 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 / quote ↗
13UndatedThe room looks as if a giant dog after a large lunch of food, socks, paints, trousers and pencils, walked into that room and vomited everywhere.Barbara Kingsolver / quote ↗
14UndatedIndependence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.Barbara Kingsolver / quote ↗
15UndatedUntil that moment I'd thought I could have it both ways; to be one of them, and also my husband's wife. What conceit! I was his instrument, his animal. Nothing more. How we wives and mothers do perish at the hands of our own righteousness. I was just one more of those women who clamp their mouths shut and wave the flag as their nation rolls off to conquer another in war. Guilty or innocent, they have everything to lose. They are what there is to lose. A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.Barbara Kingsolver / quote ↗
17UndatedListen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.Barbara Kingsolver / quote ↗
18UndatedIf we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.Barbara Kingsolver / quote ↗
19UndatedWhat we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.Barbara Kingsolver / quote ↗
20UndatedSometimes history cleaves and for one helpless moment stands still like the pause when the ax splits a log and the two halves rest on end waiting to fall.Barbara Kingsolver / quote ↗
21Undateda single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. and, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. this forest eats itself and lives forever.Barbara Kingsolver / quote ↗
22Undated...whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. And peace will be with you.Barbara Kingsolver / quote ↗
23UndatedThat would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that's how they do it here. Maybe he's been in Africa so long he's forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it's called Monotony.Barbara Kingsolver / quote ↗
24UndatedAnd here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn't really want to eat 700 more calories a day.Barbara Kingsolver / quote ↗
