What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERHouseholds that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they are missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.
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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.
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I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they’re feeling because that’s how I read the seed catalogs in January.
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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.
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Time cures you first, and then it kills you.
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I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
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The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.
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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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Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them.
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The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.
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It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
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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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It’s one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
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Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
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The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER