Quote

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

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From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.
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Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
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Morning always comes.
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In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We're surrounded by advertising.
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Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair.
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I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
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When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven
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Ah, the mysterious croak. Here today, gone tomorrow. It's the best reason I can think of to throw open the blinds and risk belief. Right now, this minute, time to move out into the grief and glory. High tide.
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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.
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What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
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Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.
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He needs to go rub his soul against life.
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Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.
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I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.
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Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage.
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Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.
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Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.
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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.
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The reason most people have kids is because they get pregnant.
Barbara Kingsolver
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But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.
Barbara Kingsolver