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Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.

Barbara Kingsolver

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
School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Education Order School
What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I’m not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Fall Rocks
To people who think of themselves as God’s houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Land Stupid Thinking
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
In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career – my anti-job – that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Careers Jobs Stress
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
As a biologist, I can’t think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Plant 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
The happiest people are the ones with the most community.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Community People
A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Busybodies Hazards Thinking
Height isn’t something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Basketball Girl Nice
Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they’re afraid to plant themselves?
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Feet Feminist Girl
There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Cancer Depression Sadness
The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Average Vacation
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

Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.

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Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes