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We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.

Barbara Kingsolver

Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It’s peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Intention Peacefulness Purpose
There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Cancer Depression Sadness
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Empathy Fiction Stranger
Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Ada Balance Trying
I’ve about decided that’s the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you’re a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Feelings People Sweaters
In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Life Thing World Wrong
Time cures you first, and then it kills you.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Cure First Kill
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
She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Alone Inhumanity Once
Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Life Lucky Trying
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
She kept swimming out into life because she hadn’t yet found a rock to stand on.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Found Rocks Swimming
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
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
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Job Mother Running
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Fountain People Thinking Want

We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.

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Popular Authors

We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes