Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
This Forest eats itself and lives forever.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that nature has a self-sustaining cycle where old life gives way to new life, illustrating the interconnectedness and resilience of ecosystems.
Barbara Kingsolver's quote reflects the idea that forests, and nature as a whole, engage in a continuous cycle of growth, decay, and regeneration. The phrase 'eats itself' implies that as trees die and decompose, they provide nutrients that support the growth of new life, showcasing the resilience and eternal nature of ecosystems. It emphasizes the intricate balance of life, wherein one form of existence feeds another, ultimately reinforcing the idea that nature perpetuates itself through this dynamic process.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about sustainable practices, one could use this quote to highlight the importance of preserving forests as vital ecosystems.
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.
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.
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.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
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.
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What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation to prove how it works. What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one's own land?
...for most people in the [Jewish] Ghetto [of Warsaw] nature lived only in memory -- no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto -- and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body's rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom.
Momo listened to everyone and everything - even to the rain and the wind and the pine trees - and all of them spoke to her after their own fashion.
I grew up in a haunting postindustrial landscape where prehistoric ferns grew among tens of railway tracks surmounted by brilliant arc lights where birds nested and sang in the dead of night, because for them, it was day.
Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed - chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones.
It’s only the sea,’ said Moomintroll. ‘Every wave that dies on the beach sings a little song to a shell. But you mustn’t go inside because it’s a labyrinth and you may never come out again.