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There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.

Barbara Kingsolver

Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It’s just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Love Making Photography
Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Alone Being Life Writing
From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Fallen Tree Trouble
The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Differences Father Tasks
When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Air Hot Ignorance
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
I know I’m a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Novelist Rare Person Writing
I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it “intently political.” I’m just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Character Grief Writing
As a biologist, I can’t think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Plant Thinking
We agreed with him in principal – we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Children Littles Magic
…nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Kindness Momentous Shoulder World
…prodigal summer, the season of extravagant procreation. It could wear out everything in its path with its passionate excesses, but nothing alive with wings or a heart or a seed curled into itself in the ground could resist welcoming it back when it came.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Heart Summer Wings
Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Day Diagonal Human Nature
There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

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

Heart Moving Pain
If you’re standing in the manure pile, it’s somebody’s job to mention the stink.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Jobs Standing Stink

There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.

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There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.

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Popular Authors

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