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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Spiritual
Really
Pain
Understand
Meanness
War
Empathy
Lost
Opposite
Else
Meaningful
Opposites
Someone
Capacity
Every

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

Image
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Loose lips sink ships.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
I can count all the ways in which being a mother has enriched my understanding of the world, of character, my sense of the future and my attachment to it. I can't imagine what kind of writer I'd be if I didn't have my kids.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission, and it is treated with far less consideration.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
I believe with all my heart in delivering on my contract with my readers. They've got plenty of other things to do, so I had better give them a reason to turn every one of these 550 pages. This is my promise: I solemnly swear I'll make you laugh out loud at least once, cry a little in private, and burn whatever you left on the stove.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
...nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
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
Image
Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
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
Image
When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Everything truly important is washable.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
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