A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.
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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Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
…nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
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 -
…our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
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 -
Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
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 -
Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
It’s a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
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 -
I didn’t study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters.
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Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it’s going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
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People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
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I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
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 -
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 -
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn’t rip off.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER