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I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.

Barbara Kingsolver

Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission, and it is treated with far less consideration.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Automobile Body Feet Human Two
Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Change Forgiveness Moving
Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Day Diagonal Human Nature
It’s one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Else One Thing Somewhere
This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Believe Country States Thinking United
Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It’s more like conversation, raising new questions and inspiring you to answer them for yourself.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Believe Moving Writing
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Heart Moving Pain
But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Job Mother Running
There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Perfect Time Writing
Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Middle Night Wonder
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Group Needs World
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Creativity People Writing
I’m not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I’m doing.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Knows Pretending
Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Adults Children People
Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Miracle Vegetables
Downstream is always someone else’s up.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Always Downstream Else Someone
Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It’s peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Intention Peacefulness Purpose
No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Before Human Unnoticed World
He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Believe Father Mistake
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, it adds up.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Funny Life Running
For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Enterprise Life Threatening
I don’t understand how any good art could fail to be political.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Art Failing Political
There’s always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Always Body Fenceline Stories
…our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Moving Slides Tasks
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

New People Something Writing
It’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Changed Frightening Love Things
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Discipline Funny Things Writing

I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.

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I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.

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