Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
It's as if cats live in a seperate universe that takes up the same space as ours, but is full of facinating things like mice or sparrows or special TV programs that we can't see.
What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view.
The standard approach has been to pump up the dosage of chemicals ... Twenty percent of these approved-for-use pesticides are listed by the EPA as carcinogenic in humans.
If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.
When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.
Pay attention to your passions. They are the key to starting and finishing the book you are meant to write. I don't believe in talent. I believe in passion.
There is something in us that loves certain disasters and the fever of this moment and surrendering to that.
I write every moment that is humanly possible. I write every day and every night. The only discipline I lack is the discipline is to quit.
I have my own sheep and I literally sheer the sheep and knot sweaters for friends and family from scratch.
Quit smoking in the hope of growing old. It takes a long time to write. People go to books for wisdom and older authors tend to have more of it.
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.
To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.
The very least you can do in your life is 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.
Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.
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.
The room looks as if a giant dog after a large lunch of food, socks, paints, trousers and pencils, walked into that room and vomited everywhere.
Sometimes history cleaves and for one helpless moment stands still like the pause when the ax splits a log and the two halves rest on end waiting to fall.
There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad...Sadness is more or less like a head cold -- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Mother, you can still hold hold on but forgive, forgive and give for long as long as we both shall live, I forgive you, Mother.
I lost a child, " she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.
The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill.
The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earring on sad, rich widows
I almost never respect men. They're like flowers -- all show, a lot of color and lust. You pick them and throw them on the ground.
What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.
...The question is, why do you think you can't be a writer?""To be a writer, you need readers.""I'm no painter, then. Who ever looks at my little dumb pieces of shit?
She never says gracias because life is made of survival not grace, she says, and servants are paid to bring what they're asked.
Why does a person spend money on a stamp to spout bile at a stranger?
Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.
As a dinner guest I gratefully eat just about anything that's set before me, because graciousness among friends is dearer to me than any other agenda.
I asked Elsie how much food they needed from outside the community. 'Flour and sugar, ' she said, and then thought a bit. 'Sometimes we'll buy pretzels as a spl
When something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.
In Bobby Ogle's version of heaven everyone would wind up in one place, criminals and Muslims included.
She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.
To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.
Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining?
Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting, ' he said. 'We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.
That is surely childhood's end, when you look at a thing like a rabbit needing skinned and have to say: "Nobody else is going to do this.
The giant beech next door intends to shiver off every hair of its pelt.
Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end.
