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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.

Barbara Kingsolver

Everything truly important is washable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Housework Important
People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Life People Uncertainty
It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Homecoming Memories Mindfulness
I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Life Out Views Work
It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Daughter Day Mom Mother
In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Life Thing World Wrong
The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business…I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Business Know Obsession Small Suppose Town
Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Empathy Literature People
What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Kindness Simple Want
Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Civilization Kids Two
The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Balance Injury Success
Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you’re contagious.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Contagious Done Sleep
Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Looks Patience World
I’m of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Library Mind Soul
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Empathy Eye Looks
People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Errors People Sin
It’s the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Get One Thing Over
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
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
Height isn’t something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Basketball Girl Nice
I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Reading Writing
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Land Stupid Thinking
Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Day Diagonal Human Nature
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
Back then I was still appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting fo the dollies.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Boys Eden Girl
Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Everything Right Sure Travel
People ask without wanting to know.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Ask Knows People

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes