This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERInsomnia’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.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.
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I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
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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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I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.
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The happiest people are the ones with the most community.
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Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!
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He needs to go rub his soul against life.
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Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, it adds up.
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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.
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Sadness is more or less like a head cold – with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
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As a biologist, I can’t think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.
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the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners
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Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.
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Now, see, that’s why you want Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy…the trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn’t agree with you, all that’s left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.
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Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.
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Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It’s peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.
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From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.
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Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission, and it is treated with far less consideration.
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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?
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No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.
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Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
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You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.
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A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn’t do.
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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.
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We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.
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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