Loving some Barbara Kingsolver prose

I've loved Barbara Kingsolver for decades now (wow, am I getting that old?!?!?).  I love how she writes and what she writes about.  I just read her book of essays High Tide in Tucson (available from amazon.com at link) .  As you know, I like to mark really poignant phrases or sentences in the writing I read in an effort to help cultivate my own writing style.  Here are just some of the phrases and sentences I marked:

- on most important occasions, I cannot think how to respond, I simply do (8)
- to follow internal rhythms (8)
        --> this strikes me more now as I retype this because of my recent discussion with a good friend about her beginning to track her fertility cycle.  it is astounding how many women don't know about their own bodies.
- If we resent being bound by these ropes, the best hope is to seize them out like snakes, by the throat, look them in the eye and own up to their venom. (9)
- We invent the most outlandish intellectual grounds to justify discrimination. (9)
- Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the ski.  But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittlebush in a dry wind. (13)
   --> this is a PERFECT quote for the ideas of wants v. needs that are where any policy discussion and conflict resolution should begin
- let me be a good animal today (13)
- what matter is that I do have sisters and tomato plants, the essential things (15)
- I have taught myself joy, over and over again. (15)
- "Female rain," it's called in the Navajo: the gentle, furtive rains that fall from overcast skies between November and March.  That was weather to drink and to grow on. (17)
- What we're waiting for now is male rain.  Big, booming wait-till-your-father-gets-home cloudbursts that bully up from Mexico and threaten to rip the sky. (18)
- thrillingly drenched (19)
- Where nature rubs belly to belly with subdivision and barrio, and coyotes take shortcuts through the back alleys. (20)
- What a relief, to relinquish ownership of unownable things. (33)
- Time and again I find myself writing love letters to my rural origins. (38)
- In the final accounting, a hundred different truths are likely to reside at any given address. (43)
- The crossing is worth the storm. (53)
- I'm very quickly remembering what school is about: two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind? (58)
- Homemaking is moot if you're homeless. (62)
- in every profession, homewifery included, the necessity of feeling needed is the mother of inventive rules (63)
- I have friends and colleagues who talk to me about interesting things, and never carry concealed reptiles. (93)
- Like driving, parenting is a skill you learn by doing. . . . The skills you have going into it are hardly the point. (102-03)
- Children deprived --- of love, money, attention, or moral guidance -- grow up to have large and powerful needs. (104)
- If we intend to cleave like stubborn barnacles to our great American ethic of every nuclear family for itself, then each of us had better raise and educate offspring enough to give us each day, in our old age, our daily bread.  If we don't wish to live by bread alone, we'll need not only a farmer and a cook in the family but also a home repair specialist, an auto mechanic, an accountant, an import-export broker, a forest ranger, a therapist, an engineer, a musician, a poet, a tailor, a doctor, and at least three shifts of nurses.  If this seems impractical, then we can accept other people's kids into our lives, starting now. (105)
- Power, like space, it seemed to me, would always get used.  People expand and bloat to fill it.  (110)
- In the face of a thriving, particolored world, this narrow view is so picked and absurd I'm astonished that it gets airplay.  (136)
- To judge a family's value by its tidy symmetry is to purchase a book for its cover.  There's no moral authority there. (141)
- children love to run in packs (144)
- "books," as a category of papery things with the scent of mildew, are paddling up the same stream.  (153)
- A craving for adventure afflicts my restless bones like some mineral they are missing. (158)
- dark, leggy maple woods (170)
- Poverty rarely brings out the most generous human impulses, especially when it comes to environmental matters. (174)
- To love life, really, must mean caring not only for the garden plot but also the wilderness beyond the fence, beauty and mystery for their own sake, because of how meager a world would be without them. (205)