How to Fly in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons Quotes

“When you were a child planting lilacs here with your mother, did you imagine the same honeyed scent, eight years later, waking someone like me in this house... or that you would finally show me hot to fall in love with the time on my hands, to plant flowers to outlive me?”
― Barbara Kingsolver, How to Fly in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons

“Always we walk each other home.
And always we walk some of it alone.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, How to Fly in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons

“In the Great Dividing Range I crave to repent.
In filtered tree fern light I confess the sins
of my tribe: we worship the future, demean
the past, pay no mind to the present.
But a future, cut off from the promise of ever
joining history, lies ahead dead on its altar
while we chew on our restless feet.

What's to become of our own seeds
and betrothals: all these floss-haired children
inside us that want to live? Want to move,
stay, eat the soil from under the house,
move on. Want to hold fast but cannot
hold still. I am lifting them up
as newborns to the nursery window
looking out on the forests of Antarctica.
I tell them: This is your home.
Tell them: None of this is yours.
Do not believe as I did. When
the world breaks open, fall apart
with her entrails, fall with the stones or fly.
Let the crush of it make you into some
new thing not yourself. See how these trees
take the teat of the world and suckle it,
drinking time, knowing it is perfect
with or without them. Lacking their religion,
you will have to make your own.

You are the world that stirs. This is the world that waits.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, How to Fly in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons

“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.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, How to Fly in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons

“You’ll be surprised: you can pass off hope like a bad check. You still have time, that’s the thing. To make it good.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, How to Fly: In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons

“Tiptoe past the dogs of the apocalypse
asleep in the shade of your future.
Pay at the window. You’ll be surprised: you
can pass off hope like a bad check.
You still have time, that’s the thing.
To make it good.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, How to Fly in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons

“...carry a heart past unbearable losses...and strike its path through one more day: Get up and make intentions. I intend to call a friend on the phone. I intend to notice the flowers in the yard.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, How to Fly in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons

“Weeks, even. When I could not bear to leave the safety of my own trees, my choir of Carolina wrens.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, How to Fly: In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons