black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.

Barbara Kingsolver

Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you’re contagious.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Contagious Done Sleep
I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Government Treats Way
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
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn’t rip off.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Library Rip
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
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
She kept swimming out into life because she hadn’t yet found a rock to stand on.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Found Rocks Swimming
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
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
Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Civilization Kids Two
Growing food was the first activity that gave us enough prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories, and build our cities.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Cities Firsts Groups
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Meaningful Pain Spiritual
It’s the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Get One Thing Over
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
It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Enough People Wells
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Empathy Fiction Stranger

Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes