How to Fly: In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons

by Barbara Kingsolver

Everything that can wreck a life has been done before, done to you, even. That’s all inside you now. Half of it you won’t think of. The rest you wouldn’t dream of. Go on.

Bear in mind also the ways that you were once induced to last through the sermon, the meal, the insufferable adult conversation, all the times you wanted to be starchy but were made to be sweet.

Anything left undone you can slip like a cloth bag of marbles into the hands of a child who will be none the wiser.

dream of the troubles you had, when trouble was still yours to make.

Love is no granite boulder, praised for its size. It’s the water that parts around it, moving mountains.

Tells our girls their nonna is an encyclopedia. They should read her every day.

As people do, we’ve come looking for proof that the dead of the past were just like us. And grow quiet, having found it.

She is my mother, I am not alive, and yet I can see these things because my grandfather Henry is dead. All these parts of his life are equal now, the end and the beginning.

in the quiet living room where he hosts Cancer as his guest. The two of them are not speaking. He is angry. It can’t be helped.

New Year’s morning, standing at the sink watching new snow drift, I cosset a hope that this weather might persist, bundling a household of family into one more day as mine before the world calls us out again.

May I say that life is filled with instructions we just don’t believe we are ever going to need?

We two are hell-bent, knees burnt raw by the grass, our fists to earth, my knuckles twined in his hair cannot stop pulling: dear God the terror in that helpless crave for wounding the one you couldn’t live without.

Always we walk each other home. And always we walk some of it alone.

Critics are asses, I told him. Why make art for people who never make anything, who live only to dismember it and send its creators to sit in the corner like children?

Lonely men mistake kindness for a philosophy.

Wild in love with the autumn proviso. Trees will light themselves ember-orange at the hemline, starting their ritual drama of self-immolation.

The water in our bottles grows hot as weak tea, then scarce. We become nothing but our thirst.

When the world breaks open, fall apart with her entrails, fall with the stones or fly.