Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a struggle with haunting memories and a longing for release from them.
In this quote, Barbara Kingsolver reflects on the unpleasant memories that surface unbidden in the mind, comparing them to flies that swarm around a carcass. This vivid imagery evokes a sense of discomfort and desperation to escape from the burdens of the past, highlighting how memories can be intrusive and overwhelming, making one yearn for peace and freedom from these mental traps.
In practice
In a speech about coping with trauma, one might use this quote to illustrate the challenges of dealing with painful memories.
Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.
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.
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.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
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.
Come,_x000D_ _x000D_ Let's have one other gaudy night. Call to me_x000D_ _x000D_ All my sad captains. Fill our bowls once more._x000D_ _x000D_ Let's mock the midnight bell.
By the time ordinary life asserted itself once more, I would feel I had already lived for a while in some other lifetime, that I had even taken over someone else's life.
Suddenly the nickel-clad horse takes the bit in its mouth and goes slanting for the curbstone defying all prayers and all your powers to change its mind - your heart stands still, your breath hangs fire, your legs forget to work.
Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.
On a hairpin turn, above the dead forest, on no day in particular, a white Toyota crashed into a black Mercedes, for a moment blending into a blur of gray.
Of no distemper, of no blast he died, _x000D_ But fell like autumn fruit that mellow'd long: _x000D_ Even wonder'd at, because he dropp'd no sooner. _x000D_ Fate seem'd to wind him up for fourscore years; _x000D_ Yet freshly ran he on ten winters more; _x000D_ Till like a clock worn out with eating time, _x000D_ The wheels of weary life at last stood still.
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