Barbara Kingsolver Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Running #Hope #Morning

“Something in me was always watching life from the outside, permanently obsessed with the notion of belonging vs. not-belonging [to a group]. It did not make for a happy childhood, but it was excellent training for a writer.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Childhood #Training #Groups

“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.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Hope #Dream #Life Lesson

“I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Grief #Writing #Character

“Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#People #Trying #Want

“Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Country #Trying #Borders

“Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Life #Being Alone #Writing

“Root out all the "to be" verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No "It was" or "they are" or "I am." Don't let it be, make it happen.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Roots #Verbs #Prose

“It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Mom #Daughter #Mother

“Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Inspirational #Memories #Twins

“When I look out the window, I exhale a prayer of thanks for the color green, for my children's safety, for the simple acts of faith like planting a garden that helped see us through another spring, another summer. And I inhale some kind of promise to protect my kids' hopes and good intentions we began with in this country. Freedom of speech, the protection of diversity - these are the most important ingredients of American civil life and my own survival. If I ever took them for granted, I don't know.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Summer #Country #Prayer

“You don't think you'll live past it and you don't really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that's still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Grief #Past #Thinking

“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.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Thinking #People #Want

“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.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Depression #Cancer #Sadness

“Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job...And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct...Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Jobs #Moving #Loss

“It's a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Writing #Funny Things #Discipline

“Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Bird #Safe #Nests

“Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#World #Used #Determine

“Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Writing #Work Ethic #Waiting

“Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Appreciate #Stranger

“It's terrible to lose somebody, but it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Thinking #People #Terrible

“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.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Wonder #Grows #Willing

“After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#People #Parent #Missionary

“As a biologist, I can't think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Animal #Thinking #Plant

“Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Writing #Drawing #People

“Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Thinking #Feet #Pavement

“Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Animal #Vegetables #Skills

“It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Get Over

“If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Dream #Sweet #Want

“Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they are missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven.”
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Song #Animal #Vegetables