Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I was afflicted with Africa like a bout of a rare disease from which I have not managed a full recovery.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on a complex and perhaps painful relationship with Africa, indicating a sense of loss and unresolved feelings.
In this quote, Barbara Kingsolver communicates the profound emotional ties she formed with Africa, suggesting that her experiences there were significant but ultimately led to a sense of parting or disillusionment. By comparing her connection to Africa to a rare disease, she implies that the impact of her relationship with the continent is enduring and complex, highlighting both the beauty and the struggles of such an engagement.
Themes
AfricaRelationshipJourneyExperienceDisillusionment
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a discussion about the emotional impacts of travel.
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
To find yourself jilted is a blow to your pride. Do your best to forget it and if you don't succeed, at least pretend to.
MoliereRead
Women are not in love with me but with the picture of me on the screen. I am merely the canvas on which women paint their dreams.
Rudolph ValentinoRead
It’s amazing how lonely you can feel and like nobody understands…The moment you are vulnerable, someone always reaches out….They go through the same things. I want them to feel comfortable knowing that I have flaws as wells. I want them to know those flaws. I’m afraid of the pedestal…I want to be a peer to my fans
RihannaRead
Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night.
Jhumpa LahiriRead
Love, the quest; marriage, the conquest; divorce, the inquest.
Helen RowlandRead
If you hit a pony over the nose at the outset of your acquaintance, he may not love you but he will take a deep interest in your movements ever afterwards
Rudyard KiplingRead