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Sugar, it’s no parade but you’ll get down the street one way or another, so you’d just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.

Barbara Kingsolver

Height isn’t something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Basketball Girl Nice
When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Air Hot Ignorance
Poetry 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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Borders Country Trying
… Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, ‘so far from everything?’ When I hear this question over the phone, I’m usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Garden Running Thinking
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
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Fall Rocks
To people who think of themselves as God’s houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Land Stupid Thinking
Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Prayer Transactions
Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man’s skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people’s back yards.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Father Heart Men
Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Childhood Transition Unnoticed
Now I’m starting to think he wasn’t supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Doorways Starting Thinking
If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Art Bread Real
Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history… Listen being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Alive Different Views
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

Enough People Wells
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Doubt Writing
Everything truly important is washable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Housework Important
The way I see it, a person isn’t nothing more than a scarecrow… The only difference between one that stands up good and one that blows over is what kind of a stick they’re stuck up there on.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Blow Differences Way
Sadness is more or less like a head cold – with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Cancer Depression Sadness
Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Else Happensm Something Thinking
From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Kitchen Memories Men
If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dream Sweet Want
The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Balance Injury Success
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

Airplane Staring Steps
The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Earth Men Sound
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
It’s the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Get One Thing Over
I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Allies Imperfect Like Me

Sugar, it’s no parade but you’ll get down the street one way or another, so you’d just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.

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Sugar, it’s no parade but you’ll get down the street one way or another, so you’d just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes