black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.

Barbara Kingsolver

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

Important Pieces Stories
It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Daughter Day Mom Mother
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It’s the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else’s pain is as meaningful as your own.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

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

Empathy Literature People
The talkers are rising above the thinkers.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Rise Above Rising Talking
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
The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Air Both Grief Real Thing
It’s what you do that makes your soul.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dream Rabbits Soul
The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business…I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Business Know Obsession Small Suppose Town
The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Change May Salvation
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Grief Past Thinking
The truth needs so little rehearsal.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Honesty Needs Truth
Last time I talked to her she didn’t sound like herself. She’s depressed. It’s awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they’re no good.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

People Running Thinking
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 personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Government Treats Way
Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It’s more like conversation, raising new questions and inspiring you to answer them for yourself.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Believe Moving Writing

A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes