I know I’m a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
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.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.
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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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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.
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The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman’s coal buttons.
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Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.
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Honk if you love Jesus, text while driving if you want to meet up.
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Maybe life doesn’t get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we’re willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.
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Everything truly important is washable.
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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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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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Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.
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…nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.
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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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There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.
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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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Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.
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Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.
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Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man’s skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people’s back yards.
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It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.
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Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?
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The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for!
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I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.
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People ask without wanting to know.
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Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It’s just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.
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What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
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?
BARBARA KINGSOLVER