Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
Meaning of the quote
When you feel pain, it rushes to your heart immediately, like electricity. But when you learn the truth, it takes a long time to reach your heart, just like a glacier slowly moving across the land. This means that emotions like pain are felt quickly, but understanding the truth takes much more time and effort.
About Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver is an acclaimed American novelist, essayist, and poet who has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. Her works often explore themes of social justice, biodiversity, and the relationship between humans and their environment. Kingsolver has become a literary powerhouse, with each of her book titles appearing on the New York Times Best Seller list since 1993.
More quotes from Barbara Kingsolver
It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
American author, poet and essayist
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.
American author, poet and essayist
We’re animals. We’re born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
American author, poet and essayist
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
American author, poet and essayist
The important thing isn’t the house. It’s the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go… It’s one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
American author, poet and essayist
It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.
American author, poet and essayist
What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
American author, poet and essayist
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.
American author, poet and essayist
People’s dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It’s what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.
American author, poet and essayist
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, it adds up.
American author, poet and essayist
Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
American author, poet and essayist
Terms like that, “Humane Society,” are devised with people like me in mind, who don’t care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.
American author, poet and essayist
What keeps you going isn’t some fine destination but just the road you’re on, and the fact that you know how to drive.
American author, poet and essayist
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn’t rip off.
American author, poet and essayist
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
American author, poet and essayist
The truth needs so little rehearsal.
American author, poet and essayist
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
American author, poet and essayist