Sadness is more or less like a head cold – with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERPeople love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.
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Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It’s peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.
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Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I just do it.
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The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
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Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.
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Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It’s the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.
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I know I’m a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
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If you never stepped on anybody’s toes, you never been for a walk.
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Downstream is always someone else’s up.
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It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.
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I never think that anything I’m writing is bluntly political in any way. I’m not going for commentary.
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We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.
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Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.
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Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
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Time cures you first, and then it kills you.
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There’s always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.
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I don’t bring expectations to any of my books. I don’t tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.
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From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.
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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.
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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.
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The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
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Sugar, it’s no parade but you’ll get down the street one way or another, so you’d just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.
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For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.
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Many of us who aren’t farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.
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The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.
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Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER