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The Lacuna QUOTES

The Lacuna QUOTES

1 " Time cures you first, and then it kills you. "

― Barbara Kingsolver , The Lacuna

2 " 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 , The Lacuna

3 " 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. "

― Barbara Kingsolver , The Lacuna

4 " 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 , The Lacuna

5 " 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 , The Lacuna

6 " 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 , The Lacuna

7 " 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 , The Lacuna

8 " 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 , The Lacuna

9 " We are bodies, sometimes with dreams and always with desires. "

― Barbara Kingsolver , The Lacuna

10 " 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 , The Lacuna

11 " Why does a person spend money on a stamp to spout bile at a stranger? "

― Barbara Kingsolver , The Lacuna

12 " The giant beech next door intends to shiver off every hair of its pelt. "

― Barbara Kingsolver , The Lacuna

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

― Barbara Kingsolver , The Lacuna

14 " 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 , The Lacuna

15 " 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 , The Lacuna

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

― Barbara Kingsolver , The Lacuna

17 " 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 , The Lacuna

18 " 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 , The Lacuna

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

― Barbara Kingsolver , The Lacuna

20 " 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 , The Lacuna