Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERThere is no perfect time to write. There is only now.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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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.
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If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.
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Time cures you first, and then it kills you.
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Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.
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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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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.
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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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The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
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A sound-bite culture can’t discuss science very well. Exactly what we’re losing when we reduce biodiversity, the causes and consequences of global warming-these traumas can’t be adequately summarized in an evening news wrap-up.
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Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down.” – Mrs. Brown
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Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.
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She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.
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Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need
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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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All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.
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School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
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Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission, and it is treated with far less consideration.
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Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
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Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It’s the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else’s pain is as meaningful as your own.
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…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.
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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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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.
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I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
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The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
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…our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.
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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