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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERA good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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I prefer to remain anomalous.
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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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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 live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
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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.
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You don’t think you’ll live past it and you don’t really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that’s still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.
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If you’re standing in the manure pile, it’s somebody’s job to mention the stink.
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One of the very first things I figured out about life…is that it’s better to be a hopeful person than a cynical, grumpy one, because you have to live in the same world either way, and if you’re hopeful, you have more fun.
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Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.
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Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
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It’s one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
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She kept swimming out into life because she hadn’t yet found a rock to stand on.
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He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.
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The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.
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There are days when I am envious of my hens: when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.
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But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.
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It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
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Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.
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The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman’s coal buttons.
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Time cures you first, and then it kills you.
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When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us everyday.
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Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he’s entitled to joy rather than submission?
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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.
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Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.
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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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Now I’m starting to think he wasn’t supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER