A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERA writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERSugar, it’s no parade but you’ll get down the street one way or another, so you’d just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERTime cures you first, and then it kills you.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERHeight isn’t something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERBack then I was still appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting fo the dollies.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERPeople ask without wanting to know.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERPoetry 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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERI’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERYou can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don’t attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER…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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERVengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERThis is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERDownstream is always someone else’s up.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERA flower is a plant’s way of making love.
BARBARA KINGSOLVEREverything truly important is washable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERThe power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER