Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERDon’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.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
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She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.
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I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.
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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.
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Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.
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Last time I talked to her she didn’t sound like herself. She’s depressed. It’s awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they’re no good.
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You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they’re not self-sufficient.
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It’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
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…our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.
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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.
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Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he’s entitled to joy rather than submission?
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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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Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!
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You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don’t attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.
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When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.
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The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
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There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.
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He needs to go rub his soul against life.
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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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A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.
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The talkers are rising above the thinkers.
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It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.
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For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.
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It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
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Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
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If you never stepped on anybody’s toes, you never been for a walk.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER