A Quote by Barbara Kingsolver

The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.

Barbara Kingsolver

Quote Topics

Absence Air Both Grief Imaginary Like Real Rope Substance Things Those

Quote Author

Barbara Kingsolver
American - Novelist
Born: April 8, 1955

imaginary things were often the only items of real substance in people's lives.

Brandon Sanderson

Loss is the absence of something we were once attached to. Grief is the rope burns left behind, when that which is held is pulled beyond our grasp.

Stephen Levine

New grief, when it came, you could feel filling the air. It took up all the room there was. The place itself, the whole place, became a reminder of the absence of the hurt or the dead or the missing one. I don't believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.

Wendell Berry

A man is like a rope: both break at a definite strain....The solution is not splicing the rope; it's lessening the tension.

Jack Vance

Gratitude: An imaginary emotion that rewards an imaginary behavior, altruism. Both imaginaries are false faces for selfishness, which is a real and honest emotion.

Robert A. Heinlein

To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost." So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions." An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.

Anne Rice

Actors speak of things imaginary as if they were real, while you preachers too often speak of things real as if they were imaginary.

Thomas Betterton

The imaginary expression ?(-a) and the negative expression -b, have this resemblance, that either of them occurring as the solution of a problem indicates some inconsistency or absurdity. As far as real meaning is concerned, both are imaginary, since 0 - a is as inconceivable as ?(-a).

Augustus De Morgan

When real nobleness accompanies that imaginary one of birth, the imaginary seems to mix with real, and becomes real too.

Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

Darkness is the absence of light. Happiness is the absence of pain. Anger is the absence of joy. Jealousy is the absence of confidence. Love is the absence of doubt. Hate is the absence of peace. Fear is the absence of faith. Life is the absence of death.

Jess Bowen

The film from the beginning is not the real world; it's an imaginary world. And this imaginary world is both inside and outside the normal world.

Lucile Hadzihalilovic

Some things can be both real and imaginary at the same time, . . . some lies can be true, . . . broken faith may be restored.

Joanne Harris

Grief takes many forms, including the absence of grief

Alison Bechdel

Ramona stepped back into her closet, slid the door shut, pressed an imaginary button, and when her imaginary elevator had made its imaginary descent, stepped out onto the real first floor and raced a real problem. Her mother and father were leaving for Parents' Night.

Beverly Cleary

Complete knowledge of the nature of an analytic function must also include insight into its behavior for imaginary values of the arguments. Often the latter is indispensable even for a proper appreciation of the behavior of the function for real arguments. It is therefore essential that the original determination of the function concept be broadened to a domain of magnitudes which includes both the real and the imaginary quantities, on an equal footing, under the single designation complex numbers.