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 KINGSOLVERYou 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.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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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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It’s what you do that makes your soul.
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I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.
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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.
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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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The way I see it, a person isn’t nothing more than a scarecrow… The only difference between one that stands up good and one that blows over is what kind of a stick they’re stuck up there on.
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People ask without wanting to know.
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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.
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There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.
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It’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
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Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.
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the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners
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They all attended Hester’s church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.
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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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This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
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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.
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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.
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If it’s important, your heart remembers.
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Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I just do it.
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If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
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I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
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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.
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I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.
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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.
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I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
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I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER