Quotes From "The Lacuna" By Barbara Kingsolver

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. Barbara Kingsolver

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. Barbara Kingsolver

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. Barbara Kingsolver

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. Barbara Kingsolver

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. Barbara Kingsolver

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. Barbara Kingsolver

We are bodies, sometimes with dreams and always with desires. Barbara Kingsolver

She never says gracias because life is made of survival not grace, she says, and servants are paid to bring what they're asked. Barbara Kingsolver

Why does a person spend money on a stamp to spout bile at a stranger? Barbara Kingsolver

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

...when the public nerve is aroused, the most impressive capacity of man is his skill for lying. Barbara Kingsolver

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. Barbara Kingsolver

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. Barbara Kingsolver

Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it. Barbara Kingsolver

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. Barbara Kingsolver

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.... Barbara Kingsolver

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? Barbara Kingsolver

Outside in the sun the Holy Mother stood on her pedestal in the garden, sorry but unsympathetic. The usual position of mothers. Barbara Kingsolver

But newspapers have a duty to truth, ' Van said. Lev clucked his tongue. 'They tell the truth only as the exception. Zola wrote that the mendacity of the press could be divided into two groups: the yellow press lies every day without hesitating. But others, like the Times, speak the truth on all inconsequential occasions, so they can deceive the public with the requisite authority when it becomes necessary.' Van got up from his chair to gather the cast-off newspapers. Lev took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. 'I don't mean to offend the journalists; they aren't any different from other people. They're merely the megaphones of the other people. Barbara Kingsolver

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. Barbara Kingsolver