When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us everyday.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERGlobal commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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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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To think is not always to see.
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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.
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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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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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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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This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he is not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.
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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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I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it “intently political.” I’m just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.
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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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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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High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.
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Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It’s the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else’s pain is as meaningful as your own.
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Everything truly important is washable.
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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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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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When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.
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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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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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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 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.
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Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.
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I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.
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Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.
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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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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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER