Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERYou see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one’s own.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them.
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You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don’t attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.
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Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.
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Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.
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If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.
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I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.
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If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
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Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.
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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?
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Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
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School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
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organization is the religion of the single parent.
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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.
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Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!
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Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.
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Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.
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You don’t think you’ll live past it and you don’t really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that’s still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.
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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 -
Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.
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Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.
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Don’t wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.
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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 -
This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.
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Sugar, it’s no parade but you’ll get down the street one way or another, so you’d just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.
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Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
We’re animals. We’re born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER