black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.

Barbara Kingsolver

Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Day Diagonal Human Nature
To think is not always to see.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Always Thinking Visible
If you can’t dress expensive, dress memorable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dresses Expensive Memorable
A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Feeling Good Life Throwing
I know I’m a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Novelist Rare Person Writing
For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Enterprise Life Threatening
As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dark Grief Moving
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Long Passion Running
Maybe life doesn’t get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we’re willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Grows Willing Wonder
It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Discipline Funny Things Writing
Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Else Happensm Something Thinking
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Creativity People Writing
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Airplane Staring Steps
From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Kitchen Memories Men
Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what’s not in it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Empty House Lying
You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one’s own.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Ideas Life Mother No Own

Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes