Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Bitter words spoken in anger fade away unless they are documented or remembered by those who choose to hold onto negativity.
This quote by Barbara Kingsolver suggests that while harsh words said in conflict may be fleeting and forgotten as quickly as they are spoken, they can become enduring if they are recorded or if the hearers choose to dwell on them. The idea emphasizes the power of choice in how we remember interpersonal conflicts and the role that external influences play in perpetuating negativity.
Themes
BitterWordsRelationshipsConflictMemory
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about the impact of words in conflict resolution.
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
Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.
Aleksandar HemonRead
There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.
David Foster WallaceRead
No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women... When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.
Bell HooksRead
Hip-hop has done so much for racial relations, and I don't think it's given the proper credit. It has changed America immensely. I'm going to make a very bold statement: Hip-hop has done more than any leader, politician, or anyone to improve race relations.
Jay-ZRead
I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.(IAGO,ActI,SceneI)
William ShakespeareRead
Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one's self-respect. For jealous people, like dope-fiends, stoop to the lowest level and in the end inspire only disgust and loathing.
Emma GoldmanRead