This 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 KINGSOLVERI 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.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn’t rip off.
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There are days when I am envious of my hens: when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.
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The way I see it, a person isn’t nothing more than a scarecrow… The only difference between one that stands up good and one that blows over is what kind of a stick they’re stuck up there on.
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Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.
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there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I’m concerned that’s like accusing a dog of having a bark!
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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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You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.
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Sadness is more or less like a head cold – with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
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Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
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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.
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I know I’m a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
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The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
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…nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.
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For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.
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Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.
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A sound-bite culture can’t discuss science very well. Exactly what we’re losing when we reduce biodiversity, the causes and consequences of global warming-these traumas can’t be adequately summarized in an evening news wrap-up.
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I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.
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He needs to go rub his soul against life.
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Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I just do it.
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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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you’re contagious.
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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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can’t persist much longer. If it does, then we won’t.
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Sugar, 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 KINGSOLVER -
Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what’s not in it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER