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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.

Barbara Kingsolver

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dream Hope Life Lesson
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Real Thinking Writing
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
The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Balance Injury Success
If you never stepped on anybody’s toes, you never been for a walk.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Tact Toes Walks
Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Life Lucky Trying
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Creativity People Writing
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Empathy Fiction Stranger
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Fountain People Thinking Want
Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Everything Right Sure Travel
If you’re standing in the manure pile, it’s somebody’s job to mention the stink.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Jobs Standing Stink
How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Foolish Losing Loss
In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career – my anti-job – that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Careers Jobs Stress
A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn’t do.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Lifetime Terror Thinking
A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Feeling Good Life Throwing
The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Earth Men Sound

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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