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I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.

Barbara Kingsolver

I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Government Treats Way
As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dark Grief Moving
Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man’s skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people’s back yards.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Father Heart Men
Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Skills Vegetables
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dream Hope Life Lesson
Sadness is more or less like a head cold – with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Cancer Depression Sadness
From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Kitchen Memories Men
This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Believe Country States Thinking United
A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Feeling Good Life Throwing
People ask without wanting to know.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Ask Knows People
Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Else Happensm Something Thinking
Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Change Forgiveness Moving
Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Charity Needs Want
You don’t think you’ll live past it and you don’t really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that’s still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Grief Past Thinking
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
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

I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.

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I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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