Quote

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

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
Moved
Force
Culture
Past

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

Image
Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It's just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you're contagious.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Like Daniel she enteres the lions' den, but lacking Daniel's pure and unblemished soul, Ada is spiced with the flavors of vice that make for a tasty meal. Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
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
It's a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Root out all the to be verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No It was or they are or I am. Don't let it be, make it happen.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
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
Image
I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it intently political. I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
a meaningless phrase repeated again and again begins to resemble truth.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
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
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
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
Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.
Barbara Kingsolver