Many of us who aren’t farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERFriends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
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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.
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If you can’t dress expensive, dress memorable.
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I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.
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Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it’s going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.
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People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
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In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.
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Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
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She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.
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I don’t bring expectations to any of my books. I don’t tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.
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We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.
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Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
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Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them.
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There’s always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.
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I’ve about decided that’s the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you’re a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.
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The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
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I don’t understand how any good art could fail to be political.
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The 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.
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A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn’t do.
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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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…our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.
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Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair.
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It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
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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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Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It’s the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.
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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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER