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 KINGSOLVERHeight 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.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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Last time I talked to her she didn’t sound like herself. She’s depressed. It’s awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they’re no good.
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Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.
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We agreed with him in principal – we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.
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It’s a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.
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I’m of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
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If it’s important, your heart remembers.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
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.
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Downstream is always someone else’s up.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it “intently political.” I’m just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.
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If you’re standing in the manure pile, it’s somebody’s job to mention the stink.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
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Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need
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They all attended Hester’s church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.
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Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes
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It’s what you do that makes your soul.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER