black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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.

Barbara Kingsolver

There’s always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Always Body Fenceline Stories
Everything truly important is washable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Housework Important
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Thinking Wise Writing
The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don’t know.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Important Pieces Stories
Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Miracle Vegetables
If you can’t dress expensive, dress memorable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dresses Expensive Memorable
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 KINGSOLVER

Library Mind Soul
I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they’re feeling because that’s how I read the seed catalogs in January.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Eye Hands Heart
There are some who’d hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think’s been too lucky.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Kindness Rocks Thinking
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
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Poetry Summer Thinking
Now, see, that’s why you want Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy…the trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn’t agree with you, all that’s left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Guy Idaho Like Neighbor People
I don’t understand how any good art could fail to be political.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Art Failing Political
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Empathy Eye Looks
Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Empathy Literature People
I don’t bring expectations to any of my books. I don’t tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Expectations People
Sadness is more or less like a head cold – with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Cancer Depression Sadness
Maybe life doesn’t get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we’re willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Grows Willing Wonder
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Believe Father Mistake
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
You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

might Next Splits
You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one’s own.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Ideas Life Mother No Own
If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dream Sweet Want
She kept swimming out into life because she hadn’t yet found a rock to stand on.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Found Rocks Swimming
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
Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down.” – Mrs. Brown
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Needs Pull Shepherds Ups
It’s what you do that makes your soul.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dream Rabbits Soul

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