I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERIf we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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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.
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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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A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.
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A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.
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People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
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Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn’t rip off.
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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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Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.
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Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he’s entitled to joy rather than submission?
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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.
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Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what’s not in it.
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A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.
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You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don’t attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.
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… Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, ‘so far from everything?’ When I hear this question over the phone, I’m usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.
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Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.
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…prodigal summer, the season of extravagant procreation. It could wear out everything in its path with its passionate excesses, but nothing alive with wings or a heart or a seed curled into itself in the ground could resist welcoming it back when it came.
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I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.
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If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.
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A flower is a plant’s way of making love.
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The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for!
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I don’t understand how any good art could fail to be political.
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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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Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.
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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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From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.
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I prefer to remain anomalous.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER