Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
21 quotes
"Your 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."
"The 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."
"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."
"Sometimes 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."
"These paintings say Mexico is an ancient thing that will still go on forever telling its own story in slabs of color leaves and fruits and proud naked Indians in a history without shame. Their great city of Tenochtitlan is still here beneath our shoes and history was always just like today full of markets and wanting."
"I almost never respect men. They're like flowers -- all show, a lot of color and lust. You pick them and throw them on the ground."
"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."
"We are bodies, sometimes with dreams and always with desires."
"She never says gracias because life is made of survival not grace, she says, and servants are paid to bring what they're asked."
"Why does a person spend money on a stamp to spout bile at a stranger?"
"Time cures you first, and then it kills you."
"...when the public nerve is aroused, the most impressive capacity of man is his skill for lying."
"Well, the ancients might not have been very heroic. Most of them were probably like Mother, crouched somewhere trying to work out how to make fake jawbone jewelry that would look like the real thing."
"The urge to lie is produced by the contradictions in our lives. We are made to declare love for our country, while it tramples our rights and dignity."
"How does an artist learn enough about life to fill a thimble?""Soli, I'm going to tell you. He needs to go rub his soul against life. ..."
"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?"
"The giant beech next door intends to shiver off every hair of its pelt."
"Most of them don't know what communism is, could not pick it out of a lineup. They only know what anticommunism is. The two are practically unrelated."
"Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it."
"Outside in the sun the Holy Mother stood on her pedestal in the garden, sorry but unsympathetic. The usual position of mothers."
"Soon the maroon-throated howls would echo back from the other trees, father down the beach, until the whole jungle filled with roaring trees. As it was in the beginning, so it is every morning of the world."