A sound-bite culture can’t discuss science very well. Exactly what we’re losing when we reduce biodiversity, the causes and consequences of global warming-these traumas can’t be adequately summarized in an evening news wrap-up.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERHigh fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.
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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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This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
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Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
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Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It’s peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.
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If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
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You think you’re the foreigner here, and I’m the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I’m a foreigner, too.
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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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Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what’s not in it.
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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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Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.
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Honk if you love Jesus, text while driving if you want to meet up.
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He needs to go rub his soul against life.
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It’s one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
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That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don’t know how a person could ever describe that scent.
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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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Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, it adds up.
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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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School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
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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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Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.
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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.
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She kept swimming out into life because she hadn’t yet found a rock to stand on.
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Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!
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Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn’t rip off.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER