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

Barbara Kingsolver

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
Don’t wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Ethics Waiting Work Writing
Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Believe Heart Kids
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Home Moon Stars
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
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
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 KINGSOLVER

Automobile Body Feet Human Two
Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

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

Important Pieces Stories
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
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
My worst nightmare is being stuck somewhere with nothing to read.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Nightmares Nothing Stuck Worst
A flower is a plant’s way of making love.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Flower Making Love Way
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
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
The happiest people are the ones with the most community.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Community People
I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Allies Imperfect Like Me
Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dream Grows Out Right Separate
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Creativity People Writing
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Causes Evening Sound
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
What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Kindness Simple Want
Sadness is more or less like a head cold – with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Cancer Depression Sadness
From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Fallen Tree Trouble
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
I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Government Treats Way
Many of us who aren’t farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Past Real Secret

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

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes