How to Fly: In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons

by Barbara Kingsolver

Once I knew all these brick-shaped things, took them for the currency of survival. Now I have lived long and I know better.

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.

Listen, all God’s children got this yearn and half of them wish they could look just about like you do now. And so will you, if you ever get to be ninety. That photo that set you off today? How you’ll wish you’d taken more, back when your skin still held the shape of a lusty animal you forgot to love, wish you’d hung mirrors on all your walls and halls and oh hell, the fat blue indifferent sky in praise of this body you had one time when everything still worked.

sacrifice for love is a cozy hearth, or a spark that burns down the house. It’s all in the timing. The flimsy relics of childhood, yours. The car you could talk to. The tools you learned to live by. Your children intact, blessed by your diplomacy,

Love is no granite boulder, praised for its size. It’s the water that parts around it, moving mountains. Nothing new, a marriage. This union is as old as it gets: ocean floor, the wave and shore that can’t be still and can’t come apart. Think of blue-gray horizons, heavy-lidded. Don’t rule out surprising possibilities.

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.

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

Remember about being quiet. Canny, rowdy, quick, hitting any nail in the vicinity of its head: these could be the death of you.

Maybe hell and heaven are both an existence within limits: the lesser evil. Do we not all have the same stones lining the bottoms of our minds, the same narrow plank of reason crossing the top of that chasm, same funeral when it breaks to send us plunging? I’ve had my days.

He made you look like Socrates. Lonely men mistake kindness for a philosophy. People think genius thrives in tortured isolation. Lonelier ones can mistake contempt for kindness. You’re suggesting I’m lucky to know the difference.

Time by this means is domesticated and cannot run away.

You are the world that stirs. This is the world that waits.