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On The Day I Swore To Uphold The Hippocratic Oath, The Small Hairs On The Back Of My Neck Stood Up As I Waited For Lightning To Strike. Who Was I, Vowing Calmly Among All These Necktied Young Men To Steal Life Out Of Nature's Jaws, Every Old Time We Got Half A Chance And A Paycheck?... I Could Not Accept The Contract: That Every Child Born Human Upon This Earth Comes With A Guarantee Of Perfect Health And Old Age Clutched In Its Small Fist.

-Barbara Kingsolver

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On The Day I

Barbara Kingsolver

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On The Day I Swore To Uphold The Hippocratic Oath, The Small Hairs On The Back Of My Neck Stood Up As I Waited For Lightning To Strike. Who Was I, Vowing Calmly Among All These Necktied Young Men To Steal Life Out Of Nature's Jaws, Every Old Time We Got Half A Chance And A Paycheck?... I Could Not Accept The Contract: That Every Child Born Human Upon This Earth Comes With A Guarantee Of Perfect Health And Old Age Clutched In Its Small Fist.

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Mexico Admits You Through An Arched Stone Orifice Into The Tree-filled Courtyard Of Its Heart, Where A Dog Pisses Against A Wall And A Waiter Hustles Through A Curtain Of Jasmine To Bring A Bowl Of Tortilla Soup, Steaming With Cilantro And Lime. Cats Stalk Lizards Among The Clay Pots Around The Fountain, Doves Settle Into The Flowering Vines And Coo Their Prayers, Thankful For The Existence Of Lizards. The Potted Plants Silently Exhale, Outgrowing Their Clay Pots. Like Mexico's Children They Stand Pinched And Patient In Last Year's Too-small Shoes.

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. You Keep Your Eyes Open, You See This Damned-to-hell World You Got Born Into, And You Ask Yourself, 'what Life Can I Live That Will Let Me Breathe In & Out And Love Somebody Or Something And Not Run Off Screaming Into The Woods?

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.

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.

The Reason Most People Have Kids Is Because They Get Pregnant.

Mr. Shepherd, Ye Cannot Stop A Bad Thought From Coming Into Your Head. But Ye Need Not Pull Up A Chair And Bide It Sit Down." - Mrs. Brown

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

The Past Is All We Know Of The Future.

A Sound-bite Culture Can't Discuss Science Very Well. Exactly What We're Losing When We Reduce Biodiversity, The Causes And Consequences Of Global Warming-these Traumas Can't Be Adequately Summarized In An Evening News Wrap-up.

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Every One Of Us Is Called Upon, Perhaps Many Times, To Start A New Life. A Frightening Diagnosis, A Marriage, A Move, Loss Of A Job...and Onward Full-tilt We Go, Pitched And Wrecked And Absurdly Resolute, Driven In Spite Of Everything To Make Good On A New Shore. To Be Hopeful, To Embrace One Possibility After Another--that Is Surely The Basic Instinct...crying Out: High Tide! Time To Move Out Into The Glorious Debris. Time To Take This Life For What It Is.

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.

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.

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

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.

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Pay Attention To Your Passions. They Are The Key To Starting And Finishing The Book You Are Meant To Write. I Don't Believe In Talent. I Believe In Passion.

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 Love Developing Children As Characters. Children Rarely Have Important Roles In Literary Fiction - They Are Usually Defined As Cute Or Precious, Or They Create A Plot By Being Kidnapped Or Dying.

A Woman Knows She Can Walk Away From A Pot To Tend Something Else And The Pot Will Go On Boiling; If She Couldn't This World Would End At Once.

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.

With All Due Respect For The Wondrous Ways People Have Invented To Amuse Themselves And One Another On Paved Surfaces, I Find That This Exodus From The Land Makes Me Unspeakably Sad. I Think Of The Children Who Will Never Know, Intuitively, That A Flower Is A Plant's Way Of Making Love, Or What Silence Sounds Like, Or That Trees Breathe Out What We Breathe In.

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.

A Novel Can Educate To Some Extent, But First A Novel Has To Entertain. That's The Contract With The Reader: You Give Me Ten Hours And I'll Give You A Reason To Turn Every Page. I Have A Commitment To Accessibility. I Believe In Plot. I Want An English Professor To Understand The Symbolism While At The Same Time I Want The People I Grew Up With - Who May Not Often Read Anything But The Sears Catalog - To Read My Books.

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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.

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.

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.

Every Life Is Different Because You Passed This Way And Touched History.

Quit Smoking, And Observe Posted Speed Limits. This Will Improve Your Odds Of Getting Old Enough To Be Wise.

He Was Getting That Look He Gets, Oh Boy, Like Here Comes Moses Tromping Down Off Of Mount Syanide With Ten Fresh Ways To Wreck Your Life.

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?

You Can't Really Know The Person Standing Before You, Because Always There Is Some Missing Piece

Be Careful What You Give Children, For Sooner Or Later You Are Sure To Get It Back.

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.

This Is How Americans Think. You Believe That If Something Terrible Happens To Someone, They Must Have Deserved It.

Eaters Must Understand, How We Eat Determines How The World Is Used.

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

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If You're Standing In The Manure Pile, It's Somebody's Job To Mention The Stink.

People Ask Without Wanting To Know.

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

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.

If It's Important, Your Heart Remembers.

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Knowing Everything

The Truth Needs So Little Rehearsal.

Our Childhood Had Passed Over Into History Overnight. The Transition Was Unnoticed By Anyone But Ourselves.

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There Is A Strange Moment In Time, After Something Horrible Happens, When You Know It's True, But You Haven't Told Anyone Yet.

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

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What I Want Is So Simple I Almost Can't Say It: Elementary Kindness.

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

When We Traded Homemaking For Careers, We Were Implicitly Promised Economic Independence And Worldly Influence. But A Devil Of A Bargain It Has Turned Out To Be In Terms Of Daily Life. We Gave Up The Aroma Of Warm Bread Rising, The Measured Pace Of Nurturing Routines, The Creative Task Of Molding Our Families' Tastes And Zest For Life; We Received In Exchange The Minivan And The Lunchable.

Alice Wonders If Other Women In The Middle Of The Night Have Begun To Resent Their Formica.

What 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.

...whatever Is Lovely, Whatever Is Gracious, If There Is Anything Worthy Of Praise, Think About These Things. And Peace Will Be With You.

Few People Know So Clearly What They Want. Most People Can't Even Think What To Hope For When They Throw A Penny In A Fountain.

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

Things You Love

I Attempted Briefly To Consecrate Myself In The Public Library, Believing Every Crack In My Soul Could Be Chinked With A Book.

The Very Least You Can Do In Your Life Is To Figure Out What You Hope For!

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 Most Assiduous Task Of Parenting Is To Divine The Difference Between Boundaries And Bondage.

It's One Thing To Carry Your Life Wherever You Go. Another Thing To Always Go Looking For It Somewhere Else.

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.

Do You Think Its Possible To Live Without Wanting To Put Your Name On Your Paintings? To Belong To A Group So Securely You Don't Need To Rise Above It?

I Don't Look Like Who I Am.

Every Betrayal Contains A Perfect Moment, A Coin Stamped Heads Or Tails With Salvation On The Other Side.

She's Never Forgotten, Either, How A Mystery Caught In The Hand Could Lose Its Grace

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.

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.

Food Is The Rare Moral Arena In Which The Ethical Choice Is Generally The One More Likely To Make You Groan With Pleasure.

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.

...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 Moth Settled Onto The Curtain And Sat Still. It Was An Astonishing Creature, With Black And White Wings Patterned In Geometric Shapes, Scarlet Underwings, And A Fat White Body With Black Spots Running Down It Like A Snowman's Coal Buttons. No Human Eye Had Looked At This Moth Before; No One Would See Its Friends. So Much Detail Goes Unnoticed In The World.

Black And White

Time Cures You First, And Then It Kills You.

Culture Is A Slingshot Moved By The Force Of Its Past

The Very Least You Can Do In Your Life Is To Figure Out What You Hope For. And The Most You Can Do Is Live Inside That Hope. Not Admire It From A Distance But Live Right In It, Under Its Roof.

The March Of Human Progress Seemed Mainly A Matter Of Getting Over That Initial Shock Of Being Here.

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

Memory Runs Along Deep, Fixed Channels In The Brain, Like Electricity Along Its Conduits; Only A Cataclysm Can Make The Electrons Rear Up In Shock And Slide Over Into Another Channel. The Human Mind Seems Doomed To Believe, As Simply As A Rooster Believes, That Where We Are Now Is The Only Possibility

Hope Is A Renewable Option: If You Run Out Of It At The End Of The Day, You Get To Start Over In The Morning.

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

Organization Is The Religion Of The Single Parent.

No Kind Of Bomb Ever Built Will Extinguish Hatred.

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

You See Mother, You Had No Life Of Your Own. They Have No Idea. One Has Only A Life Of One's Own.

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.

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.

...nothing Momentous Comes In This World Unless It Comes On The Shoulders Of Kindness.

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.

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.

The Way I See It, A Person Isn't Nothing More Than A Scarecrow... The Only Difference Between One That Stands Up Good And One That Blows Over Is What Kind Of A Stick They're Stuck Up There On.

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God Doesn’t Need To Punish Us. He Just Grants Us A Long Enough Life To Punish Ourselves.

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.

Memory Is A Complicated Thing, A Relative To Truth, But Not Its Twin.

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To Think Is Not Always To See.

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.

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.

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.

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Sometimes I Prayed For Baby Jesus To Make Me Good, But Baby Jesus Didn't.

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

Sugar, It's No Parade But You'll Get Down The Street One Way Or Another, So You'd Just As Well Throw Your Shoulders Back And Pick Up The Pace.

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.

Friends, There Is Nothing Like Your Own Family To Make You Appreciate Strangers!

I Did It To Win Love, And To Prove Myself Capable. Not To Move Mountains. In My Opinions, Mountains Don't Move. They Only Look Changed When You Look Down On Them From Great Height.

Come To Think Of It, Just About Every Tool Was Shaped Like Either A Weenie Or A Pistol, Depending On Your Point Of View.

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

Arterial-plaque Specials That Save Minutes Now Can Cost Years, Later On.

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

It's The Thing You Fear Most That Walks Beside You All The Time.

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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.

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

I Could Never Work Out Whether We Were To View Religion As A Life-insurance Policy Or A Life Sentence.

It's What You Do That Makes Your Soul.

Lies Are Infinite In Number, And The Truth So Small And Singular.

They All Attended Hester's Church, Which Dellarobia Viewed As A Complicated Pyramid Scheme Of Moral Debt And Credit Resting Ultimately On The Shoulders Of The Lord, But Rife With Middle Managers.

Pyramid Schemes

There Are Days When I Am Envious Of My Hens: When I Hunger For A Purpose As Perfect And Sure As A Single Daily Egg.

There's Always More To A Story Than A Body Can See From The Fenceline.

Our Plans Are Small And Somewhat Absurd.

The First Steps Toward Stewardship Are Awareness, Appreciation, And The Selfish Desire To Have The Things Around For Our Kids To See. Presumably The Unselfish Motives Will Follow As We Wise Up.

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.

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

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.

Why Does A Person Even Get Up In The Morning? You Have Breakfast, You Floss Your Teeth So You'll Have Healthy Gums In Your Old Age, And Then You Get In Your Car And Drive Down I-10 And Die. Life Is So Stupid I Can't Stand It.

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

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

I Think The Most Interesting Parts Of Human Experience Might Be The Sparks That Come From That Sort Of Chipping Flint Of Cultures Rubbing Against Each Other.

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.

What Keeps Me Awake At The Wheel Is The Thrill Of Trying Something Completely New With Each Book. I’m Not A Risk-taker In Life, Generally Speaking, But As A Writer I Definitely Choose The Fast Car, The Impossible Rock Face, The Free Fall.

A Dog Can't Think That Much About What He's Doing, He Just Does What Feels Right.

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.

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.

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.

Silence Has Many Advantages. When You Do Not Speak, Other People Presume You To Be Deaf Or Feeble-minded And Promptly Make A Show Of Their Own Limitations.

There's Such A Gulf Between Yourself And Who You Were Then, But People Speak To That Other Person And It Answers; It's Like Having A Stranger As A House Guest In Your Skin.

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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.

Arguments Could Fill A Marriage Like Water, Running Through Everything, Always, With No Taste Or Color But Lots Of Noise.

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.

The Changes We Dread Most May Contain Our Salvation.

I Live In A Rural Part Of Virginia Surrounded By Farms And Farmers.

I Know How People Are, With Their Habits Of Mind. Most Will Sail Through From Cradle To Grave With A Conscience Clean As Snow...i Know People. Most Have No Earthly Notion Of The Price Of A Snow-white Conscience.

Households That Have Lost The Soul Of Cooking From Their Routines May Not Know What They Are Missing: The Song Of A Stir-fry Sizzle, The Small Talk Of Clinking Measuring Spoons, The Yeasty Scent Of Rising Dough, The Painting Of Flavors Onto A Pizza Before It Slides Into The Oven.

From The Fallen Tree Everybody Makes Firewood.

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

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.

Illusions Mistaken For Truth Are The Pavement Under Our Feet. They Are What We Call Civilization.

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.

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

Wherever I Am, Let Me Never Forget To Distinguish Want From Need

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

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.

Restraint Equals Indulgence

No Other Continent Has Endured Such An Unspeakably Bizarre Combination Of Foreign Thievery And Foreign Goodwill.

I Know I'm A Rare Person, A Trained Scientist Who Writes Fiction, Because So Few Contemporary Novelists Engage With Science.

Being A Novelist And Being A Mother Have Exactly Coincided In My Life: The Call From My Agent Saying That I Had A Contract For My First Novel - That Was On My Answering Phone Message When I Got Back From The Hospital With My First Child.

We Agreed With Him In Principal - We Were Little Scientists, Born And Bred. But Children Robbed Of Love Will Dwell On Magic.

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.

...our Best Task Is To Move Forward Without Insisting Others Slide Backward.

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

The Average Food Item On A U.s. Grocery Shelf Has Traveled Farther Than Most Families Go On Their Annual Vacations.

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

My Father Wears His Faith Like The Bronze Breastplate Of God's Footsoldiers While Our Mother's Is More Like A Good Cloth Coat With A Secondhand Fit.

The Important Thing Isn't The House. It's The Ability To Make It. You Carry That In Your Brain And In Your Hands, Wherever You Go.

The Things I Carry Closest To My Heart Are Things I Can't Own.

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.

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

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