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Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Really
Spiritual
Pain
Understand
Meanness
War
Empathy
Lost
Opposite
Else
Meaningful
Someone
Opposites
Every
Capacity
More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver
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
Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.
Barbara Kingsolver
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
I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.
Barbara Kingsolver
Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.
Barbara Kingsolver
Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.
Barbara Kingsolver
Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.
Barbara Kingsolver
Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.
Barbara Kingsolver
Loose lips sink ships.
Barbara Kingsolver
I can think of no honorable answer. 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? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world.
Barbara Kingsolver
Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I was afflicted with Africa like a bout of a rare disease from which I have not managed a full recovery.
Barbara Kingsolver
I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other.
Barbara Kingsolver
In the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.
Barbara Kingsolver
If someone does learn about the world from reading a novel of mine, that makes me very happy. It's probably not what brings me into the novel in the first place - I usually am pulled in by some big question about the world and human nature that I'm not going to resolve in the course of the novel. But I'm very devoted to getting my facts straight.
Barbara Kingsolver
In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.
Barbara Kingsolver
Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.
Barbara Kingsolver
... Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, 'so far from everything?' When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.
Barbara Kingsolver
A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.
Barbara Kingsolver
Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.
Barbara Kingsolver
How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
Barbara Kingsolver