It’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERIt is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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Downstream is always someone else’s up.
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A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn’t do.
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Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them.
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If it’s important, your heart remembers.
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I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.
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We’re animals. We’re born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
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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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Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.
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The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for!
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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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It’s what you do that makes your soul.
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I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?
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Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!
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Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
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It’s one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER