Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you’ll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can’t stand it.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Life
People’s dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It’s what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Dreams
What keeps you going isn’t some fine destination but just the road you’re on, and the fact that you know how to drive.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Perseverance
It wasn’t a matter of courage or dreams, but something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I’d spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Dreams
This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it “to the editor who can appreciate my work” and it has simply come back stamped “not at this address”. Just keep looking for the right address.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Work
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
Topics: Self-Discovery
Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? (referring to cliff dwellings)
Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Civilization
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, it adds up.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Life
The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of a dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Friend, Friendship, Discovery
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Pain, Self-Discovery
Codi: “So you think we all just have animal dreams. We can’t think of anything to dream except our ordinary lives”.
Loyd: “Only if you have an ordinary life. If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life”.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Dreams
Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Betrayal
The truth needs so little rehearsal.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Honesty
It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Memories, Memory
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
Topics: Hope
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Memories, Memory
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Reynolds Price American Novelist
- David Foster Wallace American Novelist, Essayist
- Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Indian-born American Novelist
- Herman Melville American Novelist
- Robert Penn Warren American Novelist, Poet
- Willa Cather American Novelist
- William Styron American Novelist
- Gore Vidal American Novelist
- Stephen King American Novelist
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