Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the stark contrasts between different people's life experiences and the absurdity of trivial choices in the face of severe hardship.
In this quote, Barbara Kingsolver reflects on the disparity of experiences between privileged individuals and those who face dire situations. By contrasting the mundane decisions of everyday life, like choosing toothpaste, with the agonizing choices made by those who struggle for survival, she underscores the injustice of a world where some live in comfort while others endure suffering. The speaker feels a deep sense of impotence in trying to explain such inequalities to a naive child, indicating the complexity and moral weight of these issues.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about social justice, one might use this quote to illustrate the disparity in life choices based on socioeconomic status.
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.
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.
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How then to enforce peace? Not by reason, certainly, nor by education. If a man could not look at the fact of peace and the fact of war and choose the former in preference to the latter, what additional argument could persuade him? What could be more eloquent as a condemnation of war than war itself? What tremendous feat of dialectic could carry with it a tenth the power of a single gutted ship with its ghastly cargo?
Every word and every deed, every thought and every gesture, even the simple act of paying attention can be a gift and therefore an echo of God’s life in us.
I've always been supportive of the right of Israel as a state, and I've always fought against anti-Semitism, even in my own community.
Part of being in New York is being able to brag about what used to be there.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear: Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.