black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.

Barbara Kingsolver

Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Knives Memories Novelist
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Discipline Funny Things Writing
There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Cancer Depression Sadness
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
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 loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Earth Men Sound
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
Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can’t persist much longer. If it does, then we won’t.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Environmental Feelings Ideas
… 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
It’s terrible to lose somebody, but it’s also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that’s got to be so much worse.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

People Terrible Thinking
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
Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Looks Patience World
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 KINGSOLVER

Causes Evening Sound
The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Differences Father Tasks
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
One of the very first things I figured out about life…is that it’s better to be a hopeful person than a cynical, grumpy one, because you have to live in the same world either way, and if you’re hopeful, you have more fun.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Fun Hopeful Positive
I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Best Work Offer Thinking
I don’t bring expectations to any of my books. I don’t tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Expectations People
Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dream Grows Out Right Separate
How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Bird Book Want
The happiest people are the ones with the most community.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Community People
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for!
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Anticipation Hope Life
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Empathy Fiction Stranger
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Miracle Vegetables
You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they’re not self-sufficient.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Crazy People Self
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 don’t understand how any good art could fail to be political.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Art Failing Political

Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes