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Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.

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

Cancer Depression Sadness
High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Fashion Past Salad
I’m not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I’m doing.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

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

Empty House Lying
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 KINGSOLVER

Appreciation Selfish Wise
How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Foolish Losing Loss
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Artist Novelist Writing
Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission, and it is treated with far less consideration.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Automobile Body Feet Human Two
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
The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Air Both Grief Real Thing
Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It’s just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Love Making Photography
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Empathy Eye Looks
…nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Kindness Momentous Shoulder World
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Heart Moving Pain
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

Animal Miracle Vegetables
Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dirt might Today

Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.

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Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes