Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility
Interpretation
What this quote means
Memory determines our perception of reality, and change is often triggered by significant events.
In this quote, Barbara Kingsolver explores the rigid nature of human memory and thought, comparing it to electricity flowing through fixed channels. She suggests that, much like a shock can redirect electricity, a major upheaval is often necessary for individuals to reconsider their established beliefs and perceptions, highlighting our tendency to view our current situation as the only possibility.
Themes
MemoryChangeBeliefPerceptionFuture
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about personal growth during a seminar, one could illustrate the necessary shock of change using this quote.
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
I always have a high regard for the individual and have an insuperable distaste for violence and clubmanship. All these motives made me into a passionate pacifist and anti-militarist. I am against any nationalism, even in the guise of mere patriotism. Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious, as did any exaggerated personality cult.
Albert EinsteinRead
She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.
Gertrude SteinRead
Please open your eyes now, but keep attention in the inner energy field of the body as you look around the room. The inner body lies at the threshold between your form identity and your essence identity, your true nature. Never lose touch with it.
Eckhart TolleRead
When we are unduly impatient with an omniscient God's timing, we really are suggesting that we know what's best. Strange isn't it-we who wear wrist watches seek to counsel Him who oversees cosmic clocks and calendars.
Neal A. MaxwellRead
In order to discover the character of people we have only to observe what they love.
Saint AugustineRead
The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.
Aldous HuxleyRead