If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERThey 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.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It’s the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
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.
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I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don’t move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.
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I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
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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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Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.
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The talkers are rising above the thinkers.
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High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.
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I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.
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It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.
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…nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.
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Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
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I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.
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Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don’t; but we wear it all the same
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A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.
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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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As a biologist, I can’t think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.
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When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us everyday.
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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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It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
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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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A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn’t do.
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If it’s important, your heart remembers.
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