I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERGrowing food was the first activity that gave us enough prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories, and build our cities.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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If you never stepped on anybody’s toes, you never been for a walk.
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All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.
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Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
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Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.
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Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they are missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven.
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Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.
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I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
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Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.
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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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I’m widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I’m not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.
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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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Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what’s not in it.
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From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.
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As a biologist, I can’t think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.
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When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us everyday.
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How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.
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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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Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.
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She kept swimming out into life because she hadn’t yet found a rock to stand on.
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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.
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School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
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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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Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
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She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.
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Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them.
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There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER