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Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.

Barbara Kingsolver

It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Growing Safe Water
I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Block Jobs Waiting
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
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
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Empathy Fiction Stranger
… 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
You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Kids Sorry Two
There’s always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Always Body Fenceline Stories
Households 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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Song Vegetables
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Fountain People Thinking Want
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
No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Before Human Unnoticed World
A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Busybodies Hazards Thinking
I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Life Out Views Work
Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Doors Insomnia Light
The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Important Knows Persons

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.

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Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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