One of the very first things I figured out about life…is that it’s better to be a hopeful person than a cynical, grumpy one, because you have to live in the same world either way, and if you’re hopeful, you have more fun.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERWill you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
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Maybe life doesn’t get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we’re willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.
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There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
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What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
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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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From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.
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But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.
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You think you’re the foreigner here, and I’m the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I’m a foreigner, too.
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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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
…nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.
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That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don’t know how a person could ever describe that scent.
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The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
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It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
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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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My worst nightmare is being stuck somewhere with nothing to read.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER