Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant (among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can't keep, all passion is really a setup, and we're doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and would further add: Who cares? Every spring I go out there anyway, around the bend, unconditionally. ... Come the end of the dark days, I am more than joyful. I'm nuts.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the complexities of hope and disappointment that spring brings, highlighting human resilience in the face of life's cyclical nature.
Barbara Kingsolver draws on T.S. Eliot's observation that while spring can feel cruel due to the high hopes it instills, leading to inevitable disappointment, she emphasizes an unconditional embrace of the season. Her perspective reveals a shared human experience: that despite knowing the potential for heartbreak, the joy and vitality of spring are worth the risk of emotional upheaval. Kingsolver ultimately champions a celebratory attitude towards life, valuing joy over fear of disappointment.
Themes
SpringDisappointmentJoyResilienceHope
In practice
Example use cases
During a spring retreat, you can quote this to inspire others to embrace the season despite uncertainties.
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
It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead
Justice is to be found only in the imagination.
Alfred NobelRead
My main point here is that if you are the child of God and God is a part of you, the in your imagination God suppose to look like you. And when you accept a picture of the deity assigned to you by another people, you become the spiritual prisoners of that other people.
John Henrik ClarkeRead
i am perfect because i am inseparable from the infinite, the force of life that creates the stars and the entire universe of light. i am God's creation. i don't need to be what i am not.
Miguel Angel RuizRead
Man, no doubt, owes many other moral duties to his fellow men; such as to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, protect the defenseless, assist the weak, and enlighten the ignorant. But these are simply moral duties, of which each man must be his own judge, in each particular case, as to whether, and how, and how far, he can, or will perform them.
Lysander SpoonerRead
A search for truth seems to me to be full of pitfalls. We all have different understandings of what truth is, and we'll each believe - or we are in danger of each believing - that our truth is the one and only absolute truth, which is why I say it's full of pitfalls.
Jocelyn Bell BurnellRead