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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, Let The Potatoes Stay Home.

-Barbara Kingsolver

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Most People No Longer

Barbara Kingsolver

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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, Let The Potatoes Stay Home.

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If You Never Stepped On Anybody's Toes, You Never Been For A Walk.

Value Is Not Made Of Money, But A Tender Balance Of Expectation And Longing.

He Was My Father. I Own Half His Genes, And All Of His History. Believe This: The Mistakes Are Part Of The Story. I Am Born Of A Man Who Believed He Could Tell Nothing But The Truth, While He Set Down For All Time The Poisonwood Bible.

But Still, I’d Be Darned If I Was Going To Be One Of Those Americans Who Stomp Around Italy Barking Commands In Ever-louder English. I Was Going To Be One Of Those Americans Who Traversed Italy With My Forehead Knit In Concentration, Divining Wordsw From Their Latin Roots And Answering By Wedging French Cognates Into Italian Pronunciations Spliced Onto A Standard Spanish Verb Conjugation.

The Changes We Dread Most May Contain Our Salvation.

Wake Up Now, Look Alive, For Here Is A Day Off Work Just To Praise Creation: The Turkey, The Squash, And The Corn, These Things That Ate And Drank Sunshine, Grass, Mud, And Rain, And Then In The Shortening Days Laid Down Their Lives For Our Welfare And Onward Resolve. There's The Miracle For You, The Absolute Sacrifice That Still Holds Back Seed: A Germ Of Promise To Do The Whole Thing Again, Another Time. . . Thanksgiving Is Creation's Birthday Party. Praise Harvest, A Pause And Sigh On The Breath Of Immortality.

But Kids Don't Stay With You If You Do It Right. It's The One Job Where, The Better You Are, The More Surely You Won't Be Needed In The Long Run.

It's Frightening When Things You Love Appear Suddenly Changed From What You Have Always Known.

Things You Love

... Urban Friends Ask Me How I Can Stand Living Here, 'so Far From Everything?' When I Hear This Question Over The Phone, I'm Usually Looking Out The Window At A Forest, A Running Creek, And A Vegetable Garden, Thinking: Define Everything.

Morality Is Not A Large, Constructed *thing* You Have Or Have Not, But Simply A Capacity. Something You Carry With You In Your Brain And In Your Hands.

There's Always A Part Of Your Nation's History That You Haven't Been Told That... Has A Powerful Impact On How You Yourself May Behave And May Believe.

There Is No Point Treating A Depressed Person As Though She Were Just Feeling Sad, Saying, 'there Now, Hang On, You'll Get Over It.' Sadness Is More Or Less Like A Head Cold- With Patience, It Passes. Depression Is Like Cancer.

I Stir In Bed And The Memories Rise Out Of Me Like A Buzz Of Flies From A Carcass. I Crave To Be Rid Of Them.

A Flower Is Your Cousin...sometimes A Person Has Got To Take A Life, Like A Chicken's Or A Hog's When You Need It...but Nobody Is So Hungry They Need To Kill A Flower. Cherokee Great-grandmother

The Most Important Thing About A Person Is Always The Thing You Don't Know.

Oh, That River Of Wishes, The Slippery Crocodile Dream Of It, How It Might Have Carried My Body Down Through All The Glittering Sand Bars To The Sea.

Culture Is A Slingshot Moved By The Force Of Its Past

A Choir Of Seedlings Arching Their Necks Out Of Rotted Tree Stumps, Sucking Life Out Of Death. I Am The Forest's Conscience, But Remember, The Forest Eats Itself And Lives Forever.

Thanks For This Day, For All Birds Safe In Their Nests, For Whatever This Is, For Life.

I Don't Look Like Who I Am.

You Know Reviewers, They Are The Wind In Their Own Sails.

That's How It Is: Some People Are Content To Wait Till You Ask, While Others Jump Right In With The Whole Story.

Our House Is Like An Empty Cigarette Packet, Lying Around Reminding You What's Not In It.

The Truth Needs So Little Rehearsal.

If You Can't Dress Expensive, Dress Memorable.

Of The Two Hundred Bones In The Human Body, More Than A Quarter Are In The Foot. It Is A More Complicated Instrument Than An Automobile Transmission, And It Is Treated With Far Less Consideration.

I Wonder That Religion Can Live Or Die On The Strength Of A Faint, Stirring Breeze. The Scent Trail Shifts, Causing The Predator To Miss The Pounce. One God Draws In The Breath Of Life And Rises; Another God Expires.

Listen. 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. In Perfect Stillness, Frankly, I've Only Found Sorrow.

Respecting The Dignity Of A Spectacular Food Means Enjoying It At Its Best. Europeans Celebrate The Short Season Of Abundant Asparagus As A Form Of Holiday. In The Netherlands The First Cutting Coincides With Father's Day, On Which Restaurants May Feature All-asparagus Menus And Hand Out Neckties Decorated With Asparagus Spears.

This Is What It Means To Be Alone: Everyone Is Connected To Everyone Else, Their Bodies Are A Bright Liquid Life Flowing Around You, Sharing A Single Heart That Drives Them To Move All Together. If The Shark Comes They Will All Escape, And Leave You To Be Eaten.

Libraries Are The One American Institution You Shouldn't Rip Off.

When People Are Frightened About Going Hungry And Paying Their Mortgages, A Scarcity Model Begins To Prevail; They Fear Someone Else Will Get Their Piece Of The Pie.

Everyone Should Get Dirt On His Hands Each Day. Doctors, Intellectuals. Politicians, Most Of All. How Can We Presume To Uplift The Life Of The Working Man, If We Don't Respect His Work?

A Good Title Holds Magic, Some Cognitive Dissonance, A Little Grit Between The Teeth, But Above All It Is The Jumping-off Place Into Wonder.

Codi: Gives You The Willies, Doesn't It? The Thought Of Raising Kids In A Place Where The Front Yard Ends In A Two-hundred-foot Drop? [referring To Cliff Dwellings] Loyd: No Worse Than Raising Up Kids Where The Front Yard Ends In A Freeway.

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 Brittle Brush In A Dry Wind.

For If There Is Any Single Thing That Everyone Hopes For Most Dearly, It Must Be This: That The Youngest Outlive The Oldest.

If Someone Does Learn About The World From Reading A Novel Of Mine, That Makes Me Very Happy. It's Probably Not What Brings Me Into The Novel In The First Place - I Usually Am Pulled In By Some Big Question About The World And Human Nature That I'm Not Going To Resolve In The Course Of The Novel. But I'm Very Devoted To Getting My Facts Straight.

Poetry Feels Like A Country I Visit Without A Passport, Where I Look Around Furtively, Grab Hold Of Something Precious, And Try To Smuggle It Back Across The Border. Any Poem I Get Written Down Feels Like Contraband To Me.

Because I Could Not Stop For Death He Kindly Stopped For Me, Or Paused At Least To Strike A Glancing Blow With His Sky-blue Mouth As He Passed.

When The Scope Of The Problem Seems Insuperable, Isn't It Time To Call This One, Give It Up, And Get On With Life As We Know It. I Do Know That Answer To That One: That's Called Child Abuse. When My Teenager Worries That Her Generation Won't Be Able To Fix This Problem, I Have To Admit To Her That It Won't Be Up To Her Generation. It's Up To Mine. This Is A Now-or-never Kind Of Project.

You Force People To Stop Asking Questions, And Before You Know It They Have Auctioned Off The Question Mark, Or Sold It For Scrap. No Boldness. No Good Ideas For Fixing What's Broken In The Land. Because If You Happen To Mention It's Broken, You Are Automatically Disqualified.

Asking Questions

Life Proceeds, It Enrages. The Untouched Ones Spend Their Luck Without A Thought, Believing They Deserve It.

Oh, Mercy. If It Catches You In The Wrong Frame Of Mind, The King James Bible Can Make You Want To Drink Poison In No Uncertain Terms.

Your Dreams, What You Hope For And All That, It's Not Separate From Your Life. It Grows Right Up Out Of It.

I Didn't Study Writing In School, I Studied Biology As An Undergraduate And Graduate Student. So I Think That I Write Fiction In The Scientific Way. I Love Invention, Obviously; I Love Creation Of Character. But I Do Feel Very Rooted In The Real World, Even In The Way That I Create Characters.

It's What You Do That Makes Your Soul.

It Seems Very Safe To Me To Be Surrounded By Green Growing Things And Water.

Parenting Is Something That Happens Mostly While You're Thinking Of Something Else.

Height Isn't Something You Can Have And Just Let Be, Like Nice Teeth Or Naturally Curly Hair. People Have This Idea You Have To Put It To Use, Playing Basketball, For Example, Or Observing The Weather Up There. If You Are A Girl, They Feel A Particular Need To Point Your Height Out To You, As If You Might Not Have Noticed.

Nothing To Do With Nature, Unless You Count Human Nature.

The Conspicuous Consumption Of Limited Resources Has Yet To Be Accepted Widely As A Spiritual Error, Or Even Bad Manners

Limited Resources

I Rarely Think Of Poetry As Something I Make Happen; It Is More Accurate To Say That It Happens To Me. Like A Summer Storm, A House Afire, Or The Coincidence Of Both On The Same Day.

Our Holiday Food Splurge Was A Small Crate Of Tangerines, Which We Found Ridiculously Thrilling After An Eight-month Abstinence From Citrus.... Lily Hugged Each One To Her Chest Before Undressing It As Gently As A Doll. Watching Her Do That As She Sat Cross-legged On The Floor One Morning In Pink Pajamas, With Bliss Lighting Her Cheeks, I Thought: Lucky Is The World, To Receive This Grateful Child. Value Is Not Made Of Money, But A Tender Balance Of Expectation And Longing.

Pure And Unblemished Souls Must Taste Very Bland, With An Aftertaste Of Bitterness.

Independence 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.

Insomnia’s Different,” I Said. It Was Hard To Explain This To People. “you Know The Light That Comes On When You Open The Refrigerator Door? Just Imagine It Stays On All The Time, Even After You Close The Door. That’s What It’s Like In My Head. The Light Stays On.

Your Own Family Resemblances Are A Frustrating Code, Most Easily Read By Those Who Know You Least.

The Past Is All We Know Of The Future.

There Are Always More Questions. Science As A Process Is Never Complete. It Is Not A Foot Race, With A Finish Line.... People Will Always Be Waiting At A Particular Finish Line: Journalists With Their Cameras, Impatient Crowds Eager To Call The Race, Astounded To See The Scientists Approach, Pass The Mark, And Keep Running. It's A Common Misunderstanding, He Said. They Conclude There Was No Race. As Long As We Won't Commit To Knowing Everything, The Presumption Is We Know Nothing.

Knowing Everything

For Scientists, Reality Is Not Optional.

It Feels Strange To Me To Be Living In A Box, Hiding From The Steadying Influence Of The Moon; Wearing The Hide Of A Cow, Which Is Supposed To Be Dyed To Match God-knows-what, On My Feet; Making Promises Over The Telephone About Things I Will Do At A Precise Hour Next Year.

Cooking Is 80 Percent Confidence, A Skill Best Acquired Starting From When The Apron Strings Wrap Around You Twice.

What Life Can I Live That Will Let Me Breathe In And Out And Love Somebody Or Something And Not Run Off Screaming Into The Woods?

After 'the Poisonwood Bible' Was Published, Several People Believed That My Parents Were Missionaries, Which Could Not Be Further From The Truth.

If My Setting Is New To A Reader, Or The Concerns Of The Novel Are New, I Hope They Will Learn Something About The World. I Would Like To Say That They Can Trust That What They Do Learn In The Novel Will Be Accurate, Because I Pay A Lot Of Attention To Facts. I Do A Lot Of Research To Make Sure That I'm Not Giving Them, You Know, Blue Moons Of Jupiter. It's Not Science Fiction.

I Lost A Child," She Said, Meeting Lusa's Eyes Directly. "i Thought I Wouldn't Live Through It. But You Do. You Learn To Love The Place Somebody Leaves Behind For You.

Loose Lips Sink Ships.

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 Everyday.

How Strange To Read Of A Place In A Book, And Then Stand On It, Listen To The Birds Sing, And Spit On The Cobbles If You Want.

Anybody Can Get Worked Up, If They Have The Intention. It's Peacefulness That Is Hard To Come By On Purpose.

Fish Gotta Swim, Birds Gotta Fly, Writers Will Go To Stupefying Lengths To Get The Infernal Roar Of Words Out Of Their Skulls And Onto Paper.

Fiction And Essays Can Create Empathy For The Theoretical Stranger.

It Occurs To Her That There Is One Thing About People You Can Never Understand Well Enough: How Entirely Inside Themselves They Are.

It Is Completely Usual For Me To Get Up In The Morning, Take A Look Around, And Laugh Out Loud.

Plants Do Everything Animals Do, But Slowly. They Migrate, Communicate, Deceive, Stalk Their Food And, With An Ostentation Of Styles And Perfumes To Put The Animal Kingdom To Shame, They Make Love. It's Just That Catching Them In Flagrante Delicto Might Require Time-lapse Photography.

My Worst Nightmare Is Being Stuck Somewhere With Nothing To Read.

Worst Nightmares

I've Never Gotten Over High School, To The Extent That I'm Still A Little Surprised That My Friends Want To Hang Out With Me.

Stop A Minute, Right Where You Are. Relax Your Shoulders, Shake Your Head And Spine Like A Dog Shaking Off Cold Water. Tell That Imperious Voice In Your Head To Be Still.

I Don't Know What Rituals My Kids Will Carry Into Adulthood, Whether They'll Grow Up Attached To Homemade Pizza On Friday Nights, Or The Scent Of Peppers Roasting Over A Fire, Or What. I Do Know That Flavors Work Their Own Ways Under The Skin, Into The Heart Of Longing. Where My Kids Are Concerned I Find Myself Hoping For The Simplest Things: That If Someday They Crave Orchards Where Their Kids Can Climb Into The Branches And Steal Apples, The World Will Have Trees Enough With Arms To Receive Them.

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.

Let Me Claim That Africa And I Kept Company For A While And Then Parted Ways As If We Were Both Party To Relations With A Failed Outcome. Or Say I Was Afflicted With Africa Like A Bout Of A Rare Disease From Which I Have Not Managed A Full Recovery.

This Is How Moths Speak To Each Other. They Tell Their Love Across The Fields By Scent. There Is No Mouth, The Wrong Words Are Impossible, Either A Mate Is There Or He Is Not, And If So The Pair Will Find Each Other In The Dark.

Will You Explain To Me Why People Encourage Delusional Behaviour In Children, And Medicate It In Adults?

Poor Congo, Barefoot Bride Of Men Who Took Her Jewels And Promised The Kingdom.

I Look At My Four Boys, Who Are The Colors Of Silt, Loam, Dust, And Clay, An Infinite Palette For Children Of Their Own, And I Understand That Time Erases Whiteness Altogether.

Sadness Is More Or Less Like A Head Cold - With Patience, It Passes. Depression Is Like Cancer.

Southern Appalachians Have Been Ridiculed Since The Country Began. In Fiction, They're Usually Depicted In A Cartoonish Manner. The Region Is Poor, And Very Suspicious Of Outsiders, So There's A Sort Of 'us Versus Them' Situation. They're Easy To Poke Fun At.

One Of The Very First Things I Figured Out About Life...is That It's Better To Be A Hopeful Person Than A Cynical, Grumpy One, Because You Have To Live In The Same World Either Way, And If You're Hopeful, You Have More Fun.

Maybe He's Been In Africa So Long He Has Forgotten That We Christians Have Our Own System Of Marriage, And It Is Called Monotony.

I Don't Understand How Any Good Art Could Fail To Be Political.

A Woman Without A Man -- A Condition Of 'manlessness' -- Is Defined As Alone. But A Single Mother Is Less Alone Than The Average Housewife.

Scientific Illiteracy In Our Populations Is Leaving Too Many Of Us Unprepared To Discuss Or Understand Much Of The Damage We Are Wreaking On Our Atmosphere, Our Habitat, And Even The Food That Enters Our Mouths.

Now I'm Starting To Think He Wasn't Supposed To Be My Whole Life, He Was Just This Doorway To Me.

Prayer Had Always Struck Me As More Or Less A Glorified Attempt At A Business Transaction.

Last Time I Talked To Her She Didn't Sound Like Herself. She's Depressed. It's Awful What Happens When People Run Out Of Money. They Start Thinking They're No Good.

Shoes Would Interfere With Her Conversation, For She Constantly Addresses The Ground Under Her Feet. Asking Forgiveness. Owning, Disowning, Recanting, Recharting A Hateful Course Of Events To Make Sense Of Her Complicity. We All Are, I Suppose. Trying To Invent Our Version Of The Story. All Human Odes Are Essentially One, "my Life; What I Stole From History, And How I Live With It.

What Keeps You Going Isn't Some Fine Destination But Just The Road You're On, And The Fact That You Know How To Drive.

Write A Nonfiction Book, And Be Prepared For The Legion Of Readers Who Are Going To Doubt Your Fact. But Write A Novel, And Get Ready For The World To Assume Every Word Is True.

The Substance Of Grief Is Not Imaginary. It's As Real As Rope Or The Absence Of Air, And Like Both Those Things, It Can Kill.

Perhaps Growing Up Meant We Put Our Knives Away And Feigned Ignorance Of The Damage.

We Tap Our Toes To Chaste Love Songs About The Silvery Moon Without Recognizing Them As Hymns To Copulation.

Given My Own Circumstances, I Find That Anything Can Turn Out To Belong Nearly Anywhere.

I Write Every Moment That Is Humanly Possible. I Write Every Day And Every Night. The Only Discipline I Lack Is The Discipline Is To Quit.

I Learned To Write By Reading The Kind Of Books I Wished I'd Written.

The Thing Is, It's My Own Fault. I Just Can't Put Up With A Person That Won't Go Out Of His Way For Me. And That's What A Man Is. Somebody That Won't Go Out Of His Way For You. I Bet It Says That In The Dictionary.

Hunger Of The Body Is Altogether Different From The Shallow, Daily Hunger Of The Belly. Those Who Have Known This Kind Of Hunger Cannot Entirely Love, Ever Again, Those Who Have Not.

Vengeance Does Not Subtract Any Numbers From The Equation Of Murder; It Only Adds Them.

Before That I Was A Scientist. I Did Research In Population Biology. And That's What I Always Go Back To, It Helps Me To Remember That People Are Not The End Of The World, Although We May Be When It Comes To It. We're Just One Species Among Millions In This World.

What You Lose In Blindness Is The Space Around You, The Place Where You Are, And Without That You Might Not Exist. You Could Be Nowhere At All.

There Must Be Limits, Somewhere, To The Human Footprint On This Earth. When The Whole Of The World Is Reduced To Nothing But Human Product, We Will Have Lost The Map That Can Show Us How We Got Here, And Can Offer Our Spirits An Answer When We Ask Why. Surely We Are Capable Of Declaring Sacred Some Quarters That We Dare Not Enter Or Possess.

I Have Seen Women Looking At Jewelry Ads With A Misty Eye And One Hand Resting On The Heart, And I Only Know What They're Feeling Because That's How I Read The Seed Catalogs In January.

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. Every Choice Is A World Made New For The Chosen.

There Was A Roaring In My Ears And I Lost Track Of What They Were Saying. I Believe It Was The Physical Manifestation Of Unbearable Grief.

A Person Could Spend Most Of A Lifetime In Retrospective Terror, Thinking Of All The Things One Nearly Didn't Do.

It Is True That I Do Not Speak As Well As I Can Think. But That Is True Of Most People, As Nearly As I Can Tell.

Like Daniel She Enteres The Lions' Den, But Lacking Daniel's Pure And Unblemished Soul, Ada Is Spiced With The Flavors Of Vice That Make For A Tasty Meal. Pure And Unblemished Souls Must Taste Very Bland, With An Aftertaste Of Bitterness.

There Are People Who Read My Work And Accuse Me Of Being Political! As Far As I'm Concerned That's Like Accusing A Dog Of Having A Bark!

If You Want Sweet Dreams, You've Got To Live A Sweet Life.

It Takes Your Sleeping Self Years To Catch Up To Where You Really Are. ... When You Go On A Trip, In Your Dreams You Will Still Be Home. Then After You've Come Home You'll Dream Of Where You Were. It's A Kind Of Jet Lag Of The Consciousness.

Literature Sucks You Into Another Psyche. So The Creation Of Empathy Necessarily Influences How You'll Behave To Other People.

It's Very Important To Distinguish Between Innocence And Naivete. The Innocent Do Not Deserve To Be The Victims Of Violence. But Only The Naive Refuse To Think About The Origins Of Violence And To Pursue The Possibility That The Genesis Of That Hatred Could Be Addressed.

Honk If You Love Jesus, Text While Driving If You Want To Meet Up.

Fiction Is A Sort Of Inter-human Magic, Allowing You To Travel Into A Scene And Feel It Tingle On Your Skin.

Listen. Slide The Weight From Your Shoulders And Move Forward. You Are Afraid You Might Forget, But You Never Will. You Will Forgive And Remember.

The Writing Has Been On The Wall For Some Years Now, But We Are A Nation Illiterate In The Language Of The Wall. The Writing Just Gets Bigger. Something Will Eventually Bring Down The Charming, Infuriating Naïveté Of Americans That Allows Us Our Blithe Consumption And Cheerful Ignorance Of The Secret Ugliness That Bring Us Whatever We Want.

I'm Widest Awake As A Writer Doing Something New, Engaged In A Process I'm Not Sure I Can Finish, Generating At The Edge Of My Powers. Some People Bungee Jump; I Write.

I Know People. Most Have No Earthly Notion Of The Price Of A Snow-white Conscience.

The Novel Is Inherently A Political Instrument, Regardless Of Its Subject. It Invites You - More Than Invites You, Induces You - To Live Inside Another Person's Skin. It Creates Empathy. And That's The Antidote To Bigotry. The Novel Doesn't Just Tell You About Another Life, Which Is What A Newspaper Would Do. It Makes You Live Another Life, Inhabit Another Perspective. And That's Very Important.

...prodigal Summer, The Season Of Extravagant Procreation. It Could Wear Out Everything In Its Path With Its Passionate Excesses, But Nothing Alive With Wings Or A Heart Or A Seed Curled Into Itself In The Ground Could Resist Welcoming It Back When It Came.

The Gods You Do Not Pay Are The Ones That Can Curse You Best.

It's Terrible To Lose Somebody, But It's Also True That Some People Never Have Anybody To Lose, And I Think That's Got To Be So Much Worse.

A Wife Is The Earth Itself, Changing Hands, Bearing Scars.

I Live In Southern Appalachia, So I'm Surrounded By People Who Work Very Hard For Barely A Living Wage. It's Particularly Painful That People Are Working The Farms Their Parents And Grandparents Worked But Aren't Living Nearly As Well.

When You're Given A Brilliant Child You Polish Her And Let Her Shine. Pigs In Heaven

Patriotism Threatens Free Speech With Death. It Is Infuriated By Thoughtful Hesitation, Constructive Criticism Of Our Leaders And Pleas For Peace. It Despises People Of Foreign Birth. It Has Specifically Blamed Homosexuals, Feminists And The American Civil Liberties Union. In Other Words, The American Flag Stands For Intimidation, Censorship, Violence, Bigotry, Sexism, Homophobia And Shoving The Constitution Through A Paper Shredder. Whom Are We Calling Terrorists Here?

A Breeze Shook Rain Out Of New Leaves Onto Their Hair, But In Their Pursuit Of Eternity They Never Noticed The Chill.

God Is Frightful, God Is Great--you Pick. I Choose This: God Is In The Details, The Completely Unnecessary Miracles Sometimes Tossed Up As Stars To Guide Us. They Are The Promise Of Good Fortune In A Cloudless Day, And The Animals In The Clouds; Look Hard Enough, And You'll See Them. Don't Ask If They're Real.

Pain Reaches The Heart With Electrical Speed, But Truth Moves To The Heart As Slowly As A Glacier.

Close The Door. Write With No One Looking Over Your Shoulder. Don't Try To Figure Out What Other People Want To Hear From You; Figure Out What You Have To Say. It's The One And Only Thing You Have To Offer.

Root Out All The "to Be" Verbs In Your Prose And Bludgeon Them Until Dead. No "it Was" Or "they Are" Or "i Am." Don't Let It Be, Make It Happen.

Why Is It That Only Girls Stand On The Sides Of Their Feet? As If They're Afraid To Plant Themselves?

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.

Feeling That Morality Has Nothing To Do With The Way You Use The Resources Of The World Is An Idea That Can't Persist Much Longer. If It Does, Then We Won't.

This Forest Eats Itself And Lives Forever.

You Never Knew Which Split Second Might Be The Zigzag Bolt Dividing All That Went Before From The Everything That Comes Next.

It's Tough To Break Yourself As News To A Town That Already Knows You.

The Standard Approach Has Been To Pump Up The Dosage Of Chemicals ... Twenty Percent Of These Approved-for-use Pesticides Are Listed By The Epa As Carcinogenic In Humans.

As A Biologist, I Can't Think Of Myself As Anything But An Animal Among Animals And Plant.

No Matter What Kind Of Night You're Having, Morning Always Wins.

If The Lord Hasn't Got A Boyfriend Lined Up For Me To Marry, That's His Business.

Planning Complex, Beautiful Meals And Investing One's Heart And Time In Their Preparation Is The Opposite Of Self-indulgence. Kitchen-based Family Gatherings Are Process-oriented, Cooperative, And In The Best Of Worlds, Nourishing And Soulful. A Lot Of Calories Get Used Up Before Anyone Sits Down To Consume. But More Importantly, A Lot Of Talk Happens First, News Exchanged, Secrets Revealed Across Generations, Paths Cleared With A Touch On The Arm. I Have Given And Received Some Of My Life's Most Important Hugs With Those Big Oven-mitt Potholders On Both Hands.

The Arrogance Of The Able-bodied Is Staggering. Yes, Maybe We'd Like To Be Able To Get Places Quickly, And Carry Things In Both Hands But Only Because We Have To Keep Up With The Rest Of You ... We Would Rather Be Just Like Us, And Have That Be All Right.

I Prefer To Remain Anomalous.

I'm Of A Fearsome Mind To Throw My Arms Around Every Living Librarian Who Crosses My Path, On Behalf Of The Souls They Never Knew They Saved.

It Is Harrowing For Me To Try To Teach 20-year-old Students, Who Earnestly Want To Improve Their Writing. The Best I Can Think To Tell Them Is: Quit Smoking, And Observe Posted Speed Limits. This Will Improve Your Odds Of Getting Old Enough To Be Wise.

We Aimed For No More Than To Have Dominion Over Every Creature That Moved Upon The Earth. And So It Came To Pass That We Stepped Down There On A Place We Believed Unformed, Where Only Darkness Moved On The Face Of The Waters. Now You Laugh, Day And Night, While You Gnaw On My Bones. But What Else Could We Have Thought? Only That It Began And Ended With Us. What Do We Know, Even Now? Ask The Children. Look At What They Grew Up To Be. We Can Only Speak Of The Things We Carried With Us, And The Things We Took Away.

To People Who Think Of Themselves As God's Houseguests, American Enterprise Must Seem Arrogant Beyond Belief. Or Stupid. A Nation Of Amnesiacs, Proceeding As If There Were No Other Day But Today. Assuming The Land Could Also Forget What Had Been Done To It.

The Bad Thing About Small-town Life Is That Everybody Knows Your Business...i Suppose That Is My Central Obsession. What We Owe To Society, What We Owe To Ourselves.

Sometimes The Strength Of Motherhood Is Greater Than Natural Laws.

Most Of The Girls My Age, Or Even Younger, Have Babies. They Appear Way Too Young To Be Married, Till You Look In Their Eyes. Then You'll See It. Their Eyes Look Happy And Sad At The Same Time, But Unexcited By Anything, Shifting Easily Off To The Side As If They've Already Seen Most Of What There Is. Married Eyes.

But We've All Ended Up Giving Body And Soul To Africa, One Way Or Another. Even Adah, Who's Becoming An Expert In Tropical Epidemiology And Strange New Viruses. Each Of Us Got Our Heart Buried In Six Feet Of African Dirt; We Are All Co-conspirators Here. I Mean, All Of Us, Not Just My Family. So What Do You Do Now? You Get To Find Your Own Way To Dig Out A Heart And Shake It Off And Hold It Up To The Light Again.

You Can’t Replace People You Love With Other People…but You Can Trust That You’re Not Going To Run Out Of People To Love.

The Daily Work - That Goes On, It Adds Up.

Inspirational Life

I Concentrate On Character, Theme, Language, Structure, Voice. It Actually Surprises Me That No Matter What I Write, People Declare It "intently Political." I'm Just Writing About The World I Know, As It Is. Wounds And Griefs Included.

There Is No Perfect Time To Write. There Is Only Now.

I Believe With All My Heart In Delivering On My Contract With My Readers. They've Got Plenty Of Other Things To Do, So I Had Better Give Them A Reason To Turn Every One Of These 550 Pages. This Is My Promise: I Solemnly Swear I'll Make You Laugh Out Loud At Least Once, Cry A Little In Private, And Burn Whatever You Left On The Stove.

From The Fallen Tree Everybody Makes Firewood.

Don’t Try To Make Life A Mathematics Problem With Yourself In The Center And Everything Coming Out Equal. When You’re Good, Bad Things Can Still Happen. And If You’re Bad, You Can Still Be Lucky.

Science Doesn't Tell Us What We Should Do. It Only Tells Us What Is.

How Pointless Life Could Be, What A Foolish Business Of Inventing Things To Love, Just So You Could Dread Losing Them.

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.

People Ask Without Wanting To Know.

It's A Great Freedom To Give Up On Love, And Get On With Everything Else.

Giving Up On Love

No Kind Of Bomb Ever Built Will Extinguish Hatred.

Now, See, That's Why You Want Internet Friends. You Can Find People Just Exactly Like You. Screw Your Neighbors And Your Family, Too Messy...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.

Children Model The Behavior Of Adults, On Whatever Scale Is Available To Them. Ours Are Growing Up In A Nation Whose Most Important, Influential Men - From Presidents To The Coolest Film Characters - Solve Problems By Killing People. ... We Have Taught Our Children In A Thousand Ways, Sometimes With Flag-waving And Sometimes With A Laugh Track, That The Bad Guy Deserves To Die.

There Is Something In Us That Loves Certain Disasters And The Fever Of This Moment And Surrendering To That.

This Manuscript Of Yours That Has Just Come Back From Another Editor Is A Precious Package. Don't Consider It Rejected. Consider That You've Addressed It 'to The Editor Who Can Appreciate My Work' And It Has Simply Come Back Stamped 'not At This Address'. Just Keep Looking For The Right Address.

It's As If Cats Live In A Seperate Universe That Takes Up The Same Space As Ours, But Is Full Of Facinating Things Like Mice Or Sparrows Or Special Tv Programs That We Can't See.

The Older I Get, The More I Appreciate My Rural Childhood. I Spent A Lot Of Time Outdoors, Unsupervised, Which Is A Blessing.

Restraint Equals Indulgence

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.

That Was When We Smelled The Rain. It Was So Strong It Seemed Like More Than Just A Smell. When We Stretched Out Our Hands We Could Practically Feel It Rising Up From The Ground. I Don’t Know How A Person Could Ever Describe That Scent.

A Writer's Occupational Hazard: I Think Of Eavesdropping As Minding My Business.

Bitter Words Normally Evaporate With The Moisture Of Breath, After A Quarrel. In Order To Become Permanent, They Require Transcribers, Reporters, Complicit Black Hearts.

A Careless Way Of Sauntering Across The Earth And Breaking Open Its Treasures, A Terrible Dependency On Sucking Out The World's Best Juices For Ourselves-these May Also Be Our Enemies. The Changes We Dread Most May Contain Our Salvation.

The Artist Deals With What Cannot Be Said In Words. The Novelist Says In Words What Cannot Be Said In Words.

It Takes Some Courage To Write Fiction About Politically Controversial Topics. The Dread Is You'll Be Labeled A Political Writer.

Controversial Topics

I Know I Have To Write About The Things That Keep Me Awake At Night.

When I Look Out The Window, I Exhale A Prayer Of Thanks For The Color Green, For My Children's Safety, For The Simple Acts Of Faith Like Planting A Garden That Helped See Us Through Another Spring, Another Summer. And I Inhale Some Kind Of Promise To Protect My Kids' Hopes And Good Intentions We Began With In This Country. Freedom Of Speech, The Protection Of Diversity - These Are The Most Important Ingredients Of American Civil Life And My Own Survival. If I Ever Took Them For Granted, I Don't Know.

Empathy Is Really The Opposite Of Spiritual Meanness. It's The Capacity To Understand That Every War Is Both Won And Lost. And That Someone Else's Pain Is As Meaningful As Your Own.

Food Culture In The United States Has Long Been Cast As The Property Of A Privileged Class. It Is Nothing Of The Kind. Culture Is The Property Of A Species.

I Struggle With Confidence, Every Time. I’m Never Completely Sure I Can Write Another Book. Maybe My Scope Is Too Grand, My Questions Too Hard, Surely Readers Won’t Want To Follow Me Here. A Novel Is Like A Cathedral, It Knocks You Down To Size When You Enter Into It.

There Are Some Who'd Hardly Lift A Finger For Kindness, But They Would Haul Up A Load Of Rock To Dump On Some Soul They Think's Been Too Lucky.

The Arc Of History Is Longer Than Human Vision. It Bends. We Abolished Slavery, We Granted Universal Suffrage. We Have Done Hard Things Before. And Every Time It Took A Terrible Fight Between People Who Could Not Imagine Changing The Rules, And Those Who Said, 'we Already Did. We Have Made The World New.' The Hardest Part Will Be To Convince Yourself Of The Possibilities, And Hang On.

Terms Like That, 'humane Society,' Are Devised With People Like Me In Mind, Who Don't Care To Dwell On What Happens To The Innocent.

A First Child Is Your Own Best Foot Forward, And How You Do Cheer Those Little Feet As They Strike Out. You Examine Every Turn Of Flesh For Precocity, And Crow It To The World. 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.

Sleeping Alone Seemed Unnatural To Me, And Pitiful, Something Done In Hospitals Or When You're Contagious.

Does A Man Become A Revolutionary Out Of The Belief He's Entitled To Joy Rather Than Submission?

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