Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant (among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can't keep, all passion is really a setup, and we're doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and would further add: Who cares? Every spring I go out there anyway, around the bend, unconditionally. ... Come the end of the dark days, I am more than joyful. I'm nuts.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the complexities of hope and disappointment that spring brings, highlighting human resilience in the face of life's cyclical nature.
Barbara Kingsolver draws on T.S. Eliot's observation that while spring can feel cruel due to the high hopes it instills, leading to inevitable disappointment, she emphasizes an unconditional embrace of the season. Her perspective reveals a shared human experience: that despite knowing the potential for heartbreak, the joy and vitality of spring are worth the risk of emotional upheaval. Kingsolver ultimately champions a celebratory attitude towards life, valuing joy over fear of disappointment.
Themes
SpringDisappointmentJoyResilienceHope
In practice
Example use cases
During a spring retreat, you can quote this to inspire others to embrace the season despite uncertainties.
More from Barbara Kingsolver
All quotes →Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.
Barbara KingsolverRead
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 KingsolverRead
I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Similar quotes
To every people the land is given on condition. Perceived or not, there is a Covenant, beyond the constitution, beyond sovereign guarantee, beyond the nation's sweetest dreams of itself.
Leonard CohenRead
To rewrite history on the bases of hypotheses which have not materialized is not only a fruitless task, but, in my eyes, meaningless.
Jean MonnetRead
I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
A. S. ByattRead
If there is no silence beyond and within the many words of doctrine, there is no religion, only a religious ideology. For religion goes beyond words and actions, and attains to the ultimate Truth only in silence and Love.
Thomas MertonRead
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
Hannah ArendtRead
Healthcare should be a human right and not a commodity for sale.
Jim WallisRead