Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERSilence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I just do it.
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If you never stepped on anybody’s toes, you never been for a walk.
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Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
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You don’t think you’ll live past it and you don’t really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that’s still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.
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The truth needs so little rehearsal.
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A sound-bite culture can’t discuss science very well. Exactly what we’re losing when we reduce biodiversity, the causes and consequences of global warming-these traumas can’t be adequately summarized in an evening news wrap-up.
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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.
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She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.
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The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.
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Height isn’t something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.
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The way I see it, a person isn’t nothing more than a scarecrow… The only difference between one that stands up good and one that blows over is what kind of a stick they’re stuck up there on.
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Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.
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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.
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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.
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the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners
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The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.
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Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.
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There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.
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Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?
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…nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.
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I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?
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I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.
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In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.
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I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they’re feeling because that’s how I read the seed catalogs in January.
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The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business…I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.
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We’re animals. We’re born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER