Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERSleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you’re contagious.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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He needs to go rub his soul against life.
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Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need
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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.
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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.
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Sadness is more or less like a head cold – with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
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A sound-bite culture can’t discuss science very well. Exactly what we’re losing when we reduce biodiversity, the causes and consequences of global warming-these traumas can’t be adequately summarized in an evening news wrap-up.
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I didn’t study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters.
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Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.
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The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
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School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
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How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
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I’ve about decided that’s the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you’re a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.
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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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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 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.
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…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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There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.
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A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.
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Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.
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The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.
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Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them.
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Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.
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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.
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If you never stepped on anybody’s toes, you never been for a walk.
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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.
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Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!
BARBARA KINGSOLVER