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 KINGSOLVERAnybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It’s peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don’t move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.
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Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.
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What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
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A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn’t do.
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Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used.
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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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Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
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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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Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man’s skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people’s back yards.
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The happiest people are the ones with the most community.
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 -
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.
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You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.
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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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There are days when I am envious of my hens: when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.
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All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.
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When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.
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It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.
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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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As a biologist, I can’t think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.
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I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
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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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They all attended Hester’s church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
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 -
Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
We’re animals. We’re born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER