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Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Barbara Kingsolver

Maybe life doesn’t get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we’re willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Grows Willing Wonder
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 truth needs so little rehearsal.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Honesty Needs Truth
As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn’t stop.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dark Grief Moving
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
the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Errors Limited Resources Spiritual
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Bird Book Want
People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Errors People Sin
Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Different Life Way
I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it “intently political.” I’m just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Character Grief Writing
High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Fashion Past Salad
I don’t bring expectations to any of my books. I don’t tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Expectations People
It 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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Thinking Wise Writing
Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Betrayal Heads Perfect Tails
This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he is not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dark Mouth Scent
Now, see, that’s why you want Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy…the trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn’t agree with you, all that’s left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Guy Idaho Like Neighbor People

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

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Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

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