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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.

Barbara Kingsolver

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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Civilization Kids Two
Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Determine Used World
I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don’t move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Mountain Moving Winning
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
… Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, ‘so far from everything?’ When I hear this question over the phone, I’m usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Garden Running Thinking
When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Air Hot Ignorance
Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Cost Greed Money
Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Doubt Writing
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 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
Everything truly important is washable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Housework Important
She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Alone Inhumanity Once
You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one’s own.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Ideas Life Mother No Own
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Artist Novelist Writing
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Heart Mean Moving
The happiest people are the ones with the most community.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Community People

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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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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