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Downstream is always someone else’s up.

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

Heart Mean Moving
It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Daughter Day Mom Mother
Growing food was the first activity that gave us enough prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories, and build our cities.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Cities Firsts Groups
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Empathy Fiction Stranger
Time cures you first, and then it kills you.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Cure First Kill
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Business Know Obsession Small Suppose Town
Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Different Life Way
I’ve about decided that’s the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you’re a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Feelings People Sweaters
It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Enough People Wells
In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Long Passion Running
I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Life Out Views Work
Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Middle Night Wonder
Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Determine Used World
Many of us who aren’t farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Past Real Secret
He needs to go rub his soul against life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Life Need Rub Soul
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

New People Something Writing
A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn’t do.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Lifetime Terror Thinking
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Library Mind Soul
It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Homecoming Memories Mindfulness
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dream Inspiring Running
You think you’re the foreigner here, and I’m the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I’m a foreigner, too.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

People President Thinking
Now I’m starting to think he wasn’t supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Doorways Starting Thinking
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Appreciation Selfish Wise
I know I’m a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Novelist Rare Person Writing
Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Balance Expectations Pajamas
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

might Reality Space
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Heart Moving Pain

Downstream is always someone else’s up.

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Downstream is always someone else’s up.

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