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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.

Barbara Kingsolver

There are days when I am envious of my hens: when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Eggs Life Perfect
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

Real Thinking Writing
Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dream Grows Out Right Separate
Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Middle Night Wonder
Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Appreciate Family Stranger
People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Life People Uncertainty
Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Blow Blue Sky
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Hands Rain Strong
Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Empathy Literature People
Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Skills Vegetables
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Automobile Body Feet Human Two
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

Dark Grief Moving
Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It’s peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Intention Peacefulness Purpose
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Life Lucky Trying
Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Cost Greed Money
It’s what you do that makes your soul.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dream Rabbits Soul
Last time I talked to her she didn’t sound like herself. She’s depressed. It’s awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they’re no good.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

People Running Thinking
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 KINGSOLVER

Fun Hopeful Positive
Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Betrayal Heads Perfect Tails
The truth needs so little rehearsal.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Honesty Needs Truth
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
It’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Changed Frightening Love Things
Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I just do it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Airplane Staring Steps
…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
Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Bird Nests Safe
In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Long Passion Running
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Church Pyramid Scheme

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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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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Popular Authors

More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes