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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

Now I’m starting to think he wasn’t supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Doorways Starting Thinking
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Miracle Vegetables
The happiest people are the ones with the most community.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Community People
The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business…I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Business Know Obsession Small Suppose Town
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Black Eye Geometric Running Shape White
No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Before Human Unnoticed World
We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Believe Literature Should
You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Kids Sorry Two
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Eggs Life Perfect
Honk if you love Jesus, text while driving if you want to meet up.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Driving Honk Jesus Love
Back then I was still appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting fo the dollies.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Boys Eden Girl
If it’s important, your heart remembers.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Heart Important Remember
School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Education Order School
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
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
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Hands Rain Strong
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
This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Believe Country States Thinking United
As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dark Grief Moving
A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Busybodies Hazards Thinking
From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Kitchen Memories Men
It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Thinking Wise Writing
It’s a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Everything Freedom Give Great Love
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn’t rip off.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Library Rip
… 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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Garden Running Thinking
Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Miracle Vegetables
Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Different Life Way

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.

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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.

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Popular Authors

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