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This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.

Barbara Kingsolver

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Alone Being Life Writing
… 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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Garden Running Thinking
Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dog Voice Water
I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Inspirational Learning Trying
I’m widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I’m not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

New People Something Writing
What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Kindness Simple Want
Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Doe Numbers Revenge
Now I’m starting to think he wasn’t supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Doorways Starting Thinking
Everything truly important is washable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Housework Important
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
A flower is a plant’s way of making love.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Flower Making Love Way
There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Believe Grief Track
If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Art Bread Real
Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It’s peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Intention Peacefulness Purpose
Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Different Life Way
Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Blow Blue Sky

This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.

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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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Popular Authors

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