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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.

Barbara Kingsolver

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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Real School Writing
the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Errors Limited Resources Spiritual
Everything truly important is washable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Housework Important
What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Kindness Simple Want
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Heart Moving Pain
Many of us who aren’t farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Past Real Secret
How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Foolish Losing Loss
…our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Moving Slides Tasks
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Poetry Summer Thinking
Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dream Inspiring Running
A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Jumping Magic
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!
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dog People Political
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Artist Novelist Writing
All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Politician Promise War
Height isn’t something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Basketball Girl Nice
I’m not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I’m doing.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Knows Pretending

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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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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Popular Authors

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