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Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

Barbara Kingsolver

Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Circumstances Given Turns
Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Adults Children People
Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dog Voice Water
I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Reading Writing
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
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
Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dirt might Today
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
Don’t wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Ethics Waiting Work Writing
Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Skills Vegetables
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, it adds up.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Funny Life Running
Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Looks Patience World
They all attended Hester’s church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Church Pyramid Scheme
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
… 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
Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Betrayal Heads Perfect Tails

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

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Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

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Popular Authors

More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes