There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERThe 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.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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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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You think you’re the foreigner here, and I’m the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I’m a foreigner, too.
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There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Height 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.
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Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.
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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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Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
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It’s what you do that makes your soul.
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We’re animals. We’re born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
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I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.
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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 -
Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.
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Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.
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Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
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Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
…nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.
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If it’s important, your heart remembers.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
They all attended Hester’s church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us everyday.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
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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It’s the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.
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I don’t understand how any good art could fail to be political.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?
BARBARA KINGSOLVER