We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERNow, see, that’s why you want Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy…the trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn’t agree with you, all that’s left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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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.
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Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
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The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for!
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In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.
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I prefer to remain anomalous.
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I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
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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.
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Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don’t; but we wear it all the same
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You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.
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As a biologist, I can’t think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
organization is the religion of the single parent.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
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 -
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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This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
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The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.
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I’m not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I’m doing.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career – my anti-job – that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.
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If you can’t dress expensive, dress memorable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
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 -
the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
The thing is, it’s my own fault. I just can’t put up with a person that won’t go out of his way for me. And that’s what a man is. Somebody that won’t go out of his way for you. I bet it says that in the dictionary.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
I don’t understand how any good art could fail to be political.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
It’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER