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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
Every
Capacity
Really
Spiritual
Pain
Understand
Meanness
War
Empathy
Lost
Opposite
Else
Meaningful
Someone
Opposites
More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
Barbara Kingsolver
I think that when people read fiction, they're really reading for wisdom. I am. That's what most of us really love. If we read a novel that rocks our world, it's because there's something in it that we didn't know already. Not just information but really wisdom - sort of what to do with our information. And wisdom comes from experience.
Barbara Kingsolver
I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
Barbara Kingsolver
Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage.
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
How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.
Barbara Kingsolver
A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name.
Barbara Kingsolver
Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.
Barbara Kingsolver
I've never gotten over high school, to the extent that I'm still a little surprised that my friends want to hang out with me.
Barbara Kingsolver
You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what's broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it's broken, you are automatically disqualified.
Barbara Kingsolver
Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.
Barbara Kingsolver
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
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
I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.
Barbara Kingsolver
Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.
Barbara Kingsolver
If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
Barbara Kingsolver
I believe that the people who survive a cataclysm, rather than those who stand by and analyze it, are nearly always the more credible witnesses to their own history.
Barbara Kingsolver
There's always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.
Barbara Kingsolver
If it's important, your heart remembers.
Barbara Kingsolver
Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.
Barbara Kingsolver