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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERWhat 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.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
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The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.
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organization is the religion of the single parent.
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She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.
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There are days when I am envious of my hens: when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.
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Downstream is always someone else’s up.
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Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.
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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.
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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.
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There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.
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No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.
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I prefer to remain anomalous.
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Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it’s going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.
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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.
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We’re animals. We’re born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER