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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.

-Barbara Kingsolver

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Wake Up Now, Look

Barbara Kingsolver

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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.

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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.

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

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

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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.

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A Flower Is A Plant's Way Of Making Love.

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

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I Prefer To Remain Anomalous.

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Black And White

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We're Surrounded By Mandates, And I Believe That Literature Should Be Mandate-free. I Feel Very Strongly About That.

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

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My Life Is A Pitiful, Mechanical Thing Without A Past, Like A Little Wind-up Car, Ready To Run In Any Direction Someone Points Me.

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

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

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

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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.

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She Is Inhumanly Alone. And Then, All At Once, She Isn't.

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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.

She Kept Swimming Out Into Life Because She Hadn't Yet Found A Rock To Stand On.

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If We Can't, As Artists, Improve On Real Life, We Should Put Down Our Pencils And Go Bake Bread.

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Nonfiction Requires Enormous Discipline. You Construct The Terms Of Your Story, And Then You Stick To Them.

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.

(on Asparagus) Europeans Of The Renaissance Swore By It As An Aphrodisiac, And The Church Banned It From Nunneries.

I Don't *ever* Write About Real People. Art Is Supposed To Be Better Than That. If You Want A Slice Of Life, Look Out The Window.

School Is About Two Parts Abcs To Fifty Parts Where Do I Stand In The Great Pecking Order Of Humankind.

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

Every Life Is Different Because You Passed This Way And Touched History... Listen Being Dead Is Not Worse Than Being Alive. It Is Different Though. You Could Say The View Is Larger.

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.

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

As Long As I Kept Moving, My Grief Streamed Out Behind Me Like A Swimmer's Long Hair In Water. I Knew The Weight Was There But It Didn't Touch Me. Only When I Stopped Did The Slick, Dark Stuff Of It Come Floating Around My Face, Catching My Arms And Throat Till I Began To Drown. So I Just Didn't Stop.

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.

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Things You Love

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Giving Up On Love

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Like Kids Who Only Ever Get Socks For Christmas, But Still Believe With All Their Hearts In Santa.

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.

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

You Can Curse The Dead Or Pray For Them, But Don't Expect Them To Do A Thing For You. They're Far Too Interested In Watching Us, To See What In Heaven's Name We Will Do Next.

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.

I’ve Seen How You Can’t Learn Anything When You’re Trying To Look Like The Smartest Person In The Room.

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

A Certain Feeling Comes From Throwing Your Good Life Away, And It Is One Part Rapture.

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

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.

In A World As Wrong As This One, All We Can Do Is Make Things As Right As We Can.

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

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.

Humans Can Be Fairly Ridiculous Animals.

From My Earliest Memory, Times Of Crisis Seemed To End Up With Women In The Kitchen Preparing Food For Men.

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.

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

From The Fallen Tree Everybody Makes Firewood.

I Could Never Work Out Whether We Were To View Religion As A Life-insurance Policy Or A Life Sentence. I Can Understand A Wrathful God Who'd Just As Soon Dangle Us All From A Hook. And I Can Understand A Tender, Unprejudiced Jesus. But I Could Never Quite Feature The Two Of Them Living In The Same House. You Wind Up Walking On Eggshells, Never Knowing Which... Is At Home At The Moment.

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 My 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.

I Considered Her My Ally, Because, Like Me, She Was Imperfect.

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

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.

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

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.

I Think That When People Read Fiction, They're Really Reading For Wisdom. I Am. That's What Most Of Us Really Love. If We Read A Novel That Rocks Our World, It's Because There's Something In It That We Didn't Know Already. Not Just Information But Really Wisdom - Sort Of What To Do With Our Information. And Wisdom Comes From Experience.

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.

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

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.

The Most Important Part Of A Story Is The Piece Of It You Don't Know.

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.

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

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

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

But Nothing On This Earth Is Guaranteed, When You Get Right Down To It, You Know ? I've Been Thinking About That. About How Your Kids Aren't Really Yours, They're Just These People That You Try To Keep An Eye On, And Hope You'll All Grow Up Someday To Like Each Other And Still Be In One Piece. What I Mean Is, Everything You Get Is Really Just On Loan. Does That Make Sense?" Sure,"i Said. "like Library Books. Sooner Or Later They've All Got To Go Back Into The Nightdrop.

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

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Cecil B. DeMille

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