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181 " I am telling you what I’m telling you. Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky. "
― Barbara Kingsolver , The Poisonwood Bible
182 " When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations. "
183 " Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,” he still loves to say, as often as possible. “It’s hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes. "
184 " I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. "
185 " I have long relied on the comforts of martyrdom. "
186 " To live is to be marked, to live is to change, to die one hundred deaths. "
187 " When the spirit passed through him he groaned, throwing body and soul into his weekly purge. The "Amen enema", as I call it. My palindrome for the Reverend. "
188 " In Congo, a slashed jungle quickly becomes a field of flowers, and scars become the ornaments of a particular face. Call it oppression, complicity, stupefaction, call it what you like, it doesn't matter. Africa swallowed the conqueror's music and sang a new song of her own. "
189 " I think maybe it is true that the idle mind is the Devil's workshop. "
190 " What there is in this world, I think, is a tendency for human errors to level themselves like water throughout their sphere of influence. That's pretty much the whole of what I can say, looking back. There's the possibility of balance. Unbearable burdens that the world somehow does bear with a certain grace. "
191 " Here comes Moses tromping down off Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life. "
192 " It is impossible to describe the shock of return. I recall that I stood for the longest time staring at a neatly painted yellow line on a neatly formed cement curb. Yellow yellow line line. I pondered the human industry, the paint, the cement truck and concrete forms, all the resources that had gone into that one curb. For what? I could not quite think of the answer. So that no car would park there? Are there so many cars that America must be divided into places with and places without them? Was it always so, or did they multiply vastly, along with telephones and new shoes and transistor radios and cellophane-wrapped tomatoes, in our absence? "
193 " ...so he just stood there brewing like a coffeepot. Only with a coffeepot you know exactly what's going to come out of it. "
194 " It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell. "
195 " Conquest and liberation and democracy and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain. "
196 " There are Christians, and there are Christians. "
197 " You can't just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back. "
198 " Don't dare presume there's shame in the lot of a woman who carries on. "
199 " One way of surviving heartache is to stay busy. Making something right in at least one tiny corner of the vast house of wrongs... "
200 " Our journey was to be a great enterprise of balance. My father, of course, was bringing the Word of God—which fortunately weighs nothing at all. "