Time cures you first, and then it kills you.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERGrowing food was the first activity that gave us enough prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories, and build our cities.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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Honk if you love Jesus, text while driving if you want to meet up.
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I’m of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
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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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Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
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Now, see, that’s why you want Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy…the trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn’t agree with you, all that’s left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.
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Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down.” – Mrs. Brown
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I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.
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People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
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Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
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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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It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
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It’s a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.
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I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?
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Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.
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I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.
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Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.
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I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.
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Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.
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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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I’m widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I’m not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.
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Last time I talked to her she didn’t sound like herself. She’s depressed. It’s awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they’re no good.
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I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.
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If you’re standing in the manure pile, it’s somebody’s job to mention the stink.
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Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don’t; but we wear it all the same
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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.
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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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER