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What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.

Barbara Kingsolver

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

Important Knows Persons
A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Busybodies Hazards 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
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
there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I’m concerned that’s like accusing a dog of having a bark!
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dog People Political
A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn’t do.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Lifetime Terror Thinking
Growing food was the first activity that gave us enough prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories, and build our cities.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Cities Firsts Groups
Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It’s just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Love Making Photography
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Fountain People Thinking Want
How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Bird Book Want
I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Reading Writing
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Empathy Fiction Stranger
Downstream is always someone else’s up.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Always Downstream Else Someone
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
You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Kids Sorry Two
I’m not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I’m doing.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Knows Pretending

What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.

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What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.

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