black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

Barbara Kingsolver

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
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Criminal Inspirational Memories Mind
I prefer to remain anomalous.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Prefer Remain
I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Best Work Offer Thinking
The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Air Both Grief Real Thing
Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Doe Numbers Revenge
…our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Moving Slides Tasks
I don’t understand how any good art could fail to be political.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Art Failing Political
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
When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Air Hot Ignorance
Honk if you love Jesus, text while driving if you want to meet up.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

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

Knives Memories Novelist
Time cures you first, and then it kills you.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Cure First Kill
If it’s important, your heart remembers.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Heart Important Remember
I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Pet Python Television
Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I just do it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Airplane Staring Steps
Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Betrayal Heads Perfect Tails
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
People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Life People Uncertainty
The happiest people are the ones with the most community.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Community People
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
Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Doors Insomnia Light
I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Life Out Views Work
Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down.” – Mrs. Brown
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Needs Pull Shepherds Ups
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
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
In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Long Passion Running

If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes