The collection / 172 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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172 results · Page 5 of 8Play this collection ▷

01c. 1955 AD

As a dinner guest I gratefully eat just about anything that's set before me, because graciousness among friends is dearer to me than any other agenda.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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02c. 1955 AD

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.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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03c. 1955 AD

It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant's afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it's been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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04c. 1955 AD

Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind of all one. You know what Hester told me when we were working the sheep one time? She said it's no good to complain about your flock, because it's the put-together of all your past choices.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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05c. 1955 AD

Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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06c. 1955 AD

Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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07c. 1955 AD

I asked Elsie how much food they needed from outside the community. 'Flour and sugar,' she said, and then thought a bit. 'Sometimes we'll buy pretzels as a spl

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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08c. 1955 AD

When something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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09c. 1955 AD

He lifts her breasts, which fit perfectly into his hands, though he knows this is no promise that he gets to keep them. A million things you can't have will fit in a human hand.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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10c. 1955 AD

In Bobby Ogle's version of heaven everyone would wind up in one place, criminals and Muslims included.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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11c. 1955 AD

She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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12c. 1955 AD

To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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13c. 1955 AD

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 / quote

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14c. 1955 AD

Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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15c. 1955 AD

But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after - oh, that's love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she's gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She's the one you can't put down.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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16c. 1955 AD

Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,' he said. 'We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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17c. 1955 AD

That is surely childhood's end, when you look at a thing like a rabbit needing skinned and have to say: "Nobody else is going to do this.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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18c. 1955 AD

You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It's what these guys have decided to call America. They have the audacity to say, 'There, you sons of bitches, don't lay a finger on it. That is a finished product.'""But any country is still in the making. Always. That's just history, people have to see that.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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19c. 1955 AD

The giant beech next door intends to shiver off every hair of its pelt.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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20c. 1955 AD

Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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21c. 1955 AD

Move on. Walk forward into the light.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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22c. 1955 AD

Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man's skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people's back yards.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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23c. 1955 AD

They said it was to be a revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants’ rooms because they didn’t believe in laundry maids or cooks.Nobody does, really. Why should they? Only in having clean clothes, clean floors, and enchiladas tapatias.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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24c. 1955 AD

...animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

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