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For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.

Barbara Kingsolver

Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what’s not in it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Empty House Lying
Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Charity Needs Want
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Empathy Fiction Stranger
I never think that anything I’m writing is bluntly political in any way. I’m not going for commentary.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Political Thinking Writing
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Boys Eden Girl
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
The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Important Knows Persons
As a biologist, I can’t think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Plant Thinking
A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Feeling Good Life Throwing
It’s what you do that makes your soul.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dream Rabbits Soul
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
We’re animals. We’re born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Born Mammals
School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Education Order School
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
Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Else Happensm Something Thinking
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
Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can’t persist much longer. If it does, then we won’t.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Environmental Feelings Ideas
This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Believe Country States Thinking United
Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you’re contagious.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Contagious Done Sleep
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
The talkers are rising above the thinkers.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Rise Above Rising Talking
She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Alone Inhumanity Once
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dream Hope Life Lesson
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
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
The happiest people are the ones with the most community.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Community People
I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Farmers Farms Virginia

For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.

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For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.

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