Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the poignant juxtaposition of death and the natural world, illustrating how human experiences shape our perception of life and nature.
In this quote, Barbara Kingsolver describes a graveyard in northern France, emphasizing the striking visual of white crosses that resemble a cultivated orchard rather than a chaotic forest. This imagery prompts reflection on human nature, mortality, and how our interpretations of such landscapes can be affected by our emotions and experiences, suggesting that death is an intrinsic part of life that intertwines with our understanding of the world around us.
Themes
DeathHuman NatureGravesPerspectiveMortality
In practice
Example use cases
During a memorial speech to honor fallen soldiers.
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
An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods. . . .
E. F. SchumacherRead
Who knows whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one's own latent greatness
Italo SvevoRead
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
Frederick DouglassRead
All of us have not been to a natural prison, but everybody in here has had a spiritual prison.
T. D. JakesRead
When you see in places like Africa and parts of Asia abject poverty, hungry children and malnutrition around you, and you look at yourself as being people who have well being and comforts, I think it takes a very insensitive, tough person not to feel they need to do something.
Ratan TataRead
It is curious to note that when for reasons of conscience, people refuse to kill, they are often exempted from active military duty. But there are no exemptions for people who, for reasons of conscience, refuse to financially support the bureaucracy that actually does the killing. Apparently, the state takes money more seriously than life.
Karl HessRead