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I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?

Barbara Kingsolver

The first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see. Presumably the unselfish motives will follow as we wise up.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Appreciation Selfish Wise
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 average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Average Vacation
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
If you can’t dress expensive, dress memorable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dresses Expensive Memorable
Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Blow Blue Sky
The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Change May Salvation
Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Circumstances Given Turns
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
Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Alone Being Life Writing
For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Enterprise Life Threatening
Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Different Life Way
It’s the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Get One Thing Over
Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Doe Numbers Revenge
…prodigal summer, the season of extravagant procreation. It could wear out everything in its path with its passionate excesses, but nothing alive with wings or a heart or a seed curled into itself in the ground could resist welcoming it back when it came.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Heart Summer Wings
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn’t rip off.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Library Rip
Everything truly important is washable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Housework Important
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Black Eye Geometric Running Shape White
Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don’t; but we wear it all the same
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Fortune How Know Same Wear
It’s terrible to lose somebody, but it’s also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that’s got to be so much worse.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

People Terrible Thinking
Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Charity Needs Want
No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Before Human Unnoticed World
How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Foolish Losing Loss
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
A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Jumping Magic
That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don’t know how a person could ever describe that scent.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Hands Rain Strong
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

I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?

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I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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