Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need
BARBARA KINGSOLVERSometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
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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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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.
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To think is not always to see.
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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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…nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.
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Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.
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Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.
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Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.
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Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.
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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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If you’re standing in the manure pile, it’s somebody’s job to mention the stink.
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When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.
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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