Barbara Kingsolver, in “Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing”, p. 282
“
To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another, - that is surely the base instinct. Baser than even hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty. If the whole world of the living has no turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers.
— Barbara Kingsolver on Endurance
What It Means
This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another, - that is surely the base instinct. Baser than even hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty. If the whole world of the living has no turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers." in the context of "Barbara Kingsolver, in “Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing”, p. 282" to mean that wisdom is timeless.
Source: Wikiquote: "Endurance" (K)
The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
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About Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver (born April 8, 1955) is an American fiction writer. She has written several novels and poems, and established the Bellwether Prize for "literature of social change".
About Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver (born April 8, 1955) is an American fiction writer. She has written several novels and poems, and established the Bellwether Prize for "literature of social change".
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