Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERPoetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.
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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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Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.
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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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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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Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.
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For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.
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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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Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what’s not in it.
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The talkers are rising above the thinkers.
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It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.
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If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
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Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it’s going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.
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Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.
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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