If you can’t dress expensive, dress memorable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVEREvery 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.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.
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A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn’t do.
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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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Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them.
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We agreed with him in principal – we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.
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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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It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
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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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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.
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I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.
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Back then I was still appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting fo the dollies.
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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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As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop.
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Honk if you love Jesus, text while driving if you want to meet up.
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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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Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
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Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you’re contagious.
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The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.
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I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.
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A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.
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Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.
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From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.
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The talkers are rising above the thinkers.
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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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… 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.
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I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER