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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERShe is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?
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The truth needs so little rehearsal.
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For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.
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All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.
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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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What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.
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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.
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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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Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
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The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know.
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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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The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
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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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A sound-bite culture can’t discuss science very well. Exactly what we’re losing when we reduce biodiversity, the causes and consequences of global warming-these traumas can’t be adequately summarized in an evening news wrap-up.
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There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.
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I’m not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I’m doing.
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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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What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I’m not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall.
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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 bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business…I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.
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The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.
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Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It’s the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.
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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.
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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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Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don’t move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER