I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERThere is no perfect time to write. There is only now.
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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Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It’s more like conversation, raising new questions and inspiring you to answer them for yourself.
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The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
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Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.
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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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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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The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
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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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Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.
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From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.
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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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There are some who’d hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think’s been too lucky.
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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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Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!
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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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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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Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they are missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven.
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I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.
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I prefer to remain anomalous.
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I never think that anything I’m writing is bluntly political in any way. I’m not going for commentary.
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… Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, ‘so far from everything?’ When I hear this question over the phone, I’m usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.
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Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.
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Time cures you first, and then it kills you.
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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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To people who think of themselves as God’s houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.
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It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER