She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERIt kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
-
-
Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
If you can’t dress expensive, dress memorable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he is not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
You think you’re the foreigner here, and I’m the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I’m a foreigner, too.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can’t persist much longer. If it does, then we won’t.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
If it’s important, your heart remembers.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Now I’m starting to think he wasn’t supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for!
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us everyday.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Now, see, that’s why you want Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy…the trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn’t agree with you, all that’s left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER