BKBarbara Kingsolver

172 collected words

Barbara Kingsolver

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

02Undated

To stomp about the world ignoring cultural differences is arrogant, to be sure, but perhaps there is another kind of arrogance in the presumption that we may ever really build a faultless bridge from one shore to another, or even know where the mist has ceded to landfall.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

03Undated

In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again(15).

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

04Undated

It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life... Maybe being perfectly happy is not really the point. Maybe that is only some modern American dream of the point, while the truer measure of humanity is the distance we must travel in our lives, time and again, "twixt two extremes of passion--joy and grief," as Shakespeare put it. However much I've lost, what remains to me is that I can still speak to name the things I love. And I can look for safety in giving myself away to the world's least losable things.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

05Undated

Spring is made of solid, fourteen-karat gratitude, the reward for the long wait. Every religious tradition from the northern hemisphere honors some form of April hallelujah, for this is the season of exquisite redemption, a slam-bang return to joy after a season of cold second thoughts.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

06Undated

When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

07Undated

God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

08Undated

These paintings say Mexico is an ancient thing that will still go on forever telling its own story in slabs of color leaves and fruits and proud naked Indians in a history without shame. Their great city of Tenochtitlan is still here beneath our shoes and history was always just like today full of markets and wanting.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

09Undated

Those first few weeks are an unearthly season. From the outside you remain so ordinary, no one can tell from looking that you have experienced an earthquake of the soul. You've been torn asunder, invested with an ancient, incomprehensible magic. It's the one thing that we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

10Undated

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 / quote

11Undated

A novel works it's magic by putting a reader inside another person's life. The pace is as slow as life. It's as detailed as life. It requires you, the reader, to fill in an outline of words with vivid pictures drawn subconsciously from your own life, so that the story feels more personal than the sets designed by someone else and handed over via TV or movies. 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. It's why you might find yourself crying, even if you aren't the crying kind.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

12Undated

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 / quote

13Undated

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 / quote

14Undated

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.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

15Undated

I looked hard out the window and understood suddenly that what I saw was full of color. A watercolor wash of summer light lay on the Catalina Mountains. The end of a depression is that clear: it’s as if you have been living underwater, but never realized it until you came up for air.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

16Undated

So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.' Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even mo

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

17Undated

You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don't expect them to do a thing for you. They're far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven's name we will do next.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

18Undated

I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

19Undated

I never learn anything from listening to myself.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

20Undated

While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

21Undated

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.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

22Undated

Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

23Undated

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.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

24Undated

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote