Barbara Kingsolver: Other

“Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.”

“No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.”

“Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.”

“I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.”

“Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.”

“This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he is not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.”

“Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.”

“Even the most recalcitrant climate scientists agree now, the place is heating up. pretty much every one of the lot. Unless some other outcome is written on the subject line of his paycheck. […] If you were here to get information, Tina, you would not be standing in my laboratory telling me what scientists think.”

“I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire.”

“We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.”