"There has not yet been a bomb built that can extinguish hatred."

"I understand that we'll have lost everything if a hateful enemy can crush us and reconstruct us in its angry image, but what other door may lead out of this dark room? I've felt outrage I was sure would burn me alive. Some nights I've lain awake wondering how to keep on living while someone, somewhere, despises me and wishes so many of us dead because of our faith or nationality, assigning us to transgressions I can barely grasp. I wonder how to stay calm with so much beauty at stake, being scorched from my line of sight as trees fall and sacred places are ground to dust. I find it insufferable to bear silent witness to the flesh-and-bone devastations of war, and bitterly painful to be cast sometimes as a traitor to the homeland I love, simply because I raise questions.

"I find myself in a strange niche, reviled by some compatriots because I can't praise war as the best answer, and reviled everywhere else because my nation does. Each of us inhabits his or her strange niche, I suppose; we've engendered animosity for many things that most of us never contrived to do, perhaps never even knew about. Many of us can't fully believe in all the imperatives that have been pronounced the will of our people. One problem with democracy as it plays in our country is that the majority rules so hard; we seem bent on dividing all things into a contest of Win and Lose, and declaring that the Losers are losers. Nearly half of us are routinely asked to disappear while the slim majority works its will. But the playing field is the planet earth, and I for one have no place else to go."

****

"It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life...

"However much I've lost, what remains to me is that I can still speak to name the things I love. And I can look for safety in giving myself away to the world's least losable things...The treasures I carry closest to my heart are things I cannot own...

"Small change, small wonders-these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life. It's a workable economy. Political urgencies come and go, but it's a fair enough vocation to strike one match after another against the dark isolation, when spectacular arrogance rules the day and tries to force hope into hiding. It seems to me that there is still so much to say that I had better raise up a yell across the fence. I have stories of things I believe in: a persistent river, a forest on the edge of night, the religion inside a seed, the startle of wingbeats when a spark of red life flies against all reason out of the darkness...I'd like to speak of small wonders, and the possibility of taking heart."

Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder