Quote

He needs to go rub his soul against life.

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
Life
Soul
Needs

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

Image
I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they're feeling because that's how I read the seed catalogs in January.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
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
Image
People ask without wanting to know.
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
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
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
Image
Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
(on asparagus) Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac, and the church banned it from nunneries.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
it takes your sleeping self years to catch up to where you really are. ... when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
I struggle with confidence, every time. I’m never completely sure I can write another book. Maybe my scope is too grand, my questions too hard, surely readers won’t want to follow me here. A novel is like a cathedral, it knocks you down to size when you enter into it.
Barbara Kingsolver