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 KINGSOLVERClose 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.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.
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Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.
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But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.
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In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career – my anti-job – that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.
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The talkers are rising above the thinkers.
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It’s the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.
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A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.
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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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Last time I talked to her she didn’t sound like herself. She’s depressed. It’s awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they’re no good.
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The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for!
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Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.
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High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.
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Everything truly important is washable.
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I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.
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It’s what you do that makes your soul.
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The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.
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It’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
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The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.
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The happiest people are the ones with the most community.
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Now, see, that’s why you want Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy…the trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn’t agree with you, all that’s left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.
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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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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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Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used.
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Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes
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Now I’m starting to think he wasn’t supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.
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It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER