The first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see. Presumably the unselfish motives will follow as we wise up.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERLast time I talked to her she didn’t sound like herself. She’s depressed. It’s awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they’re no good.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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We agreed with him in principal – we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.
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Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It’s more like conversation, raising new questions and inspiring you to answer them for yourself.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
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If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
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To think is not always to see.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.
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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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Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they’re afraid to plant themselves?
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Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
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From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.
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People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
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The thing is, it’s my own fault. I just can’t put up with a person that won’t go out of his way for me. And that’s what a man is. Somebody that won’t go out of his way for you. I bet it says that in the dictionary.
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In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It’s the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else’s pain is as meaningful as your own.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.
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If it’s important, your heart remembers.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
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Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.
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Many of us who aren’t farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they are missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER