Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don’t; but we wear it all the same
BARBARA KINGSOLVERInsomnia’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.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
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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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It’s one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
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I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.
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You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.
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This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
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It’s a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.
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In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.
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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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There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.
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It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
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One of the very first things I figured out about life…is that it’s better to be a hopeful person than a cynical, grumpy one, because you have to live in the same world either way, and if you’re hopeful, you have more fun.
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I know I’m a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
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The happiest people are the ones with the most community.
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there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I’m concerned that’s like accusing a dog of having a bark!
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Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!
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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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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 power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
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Last 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.
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I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.
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Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It’s the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
…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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A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER