Quote

It's a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.

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
Freedom
Else
Give
Everything
Giving
Great
Love

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

Image
If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
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
Image
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
It's very important to distinguish between innocence and naivete. The innocent do not deserve to be the victims of violence. But only the naive refuse to think about the origins of violence and to pursue the possibility that the genesis of that hatred could be addressed.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
There's always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
One of the very first things I figured out about life...is that it's better to be a hopeful person than a cynical, grumpy one, because you have to live in the same world either way, and if you're hopeful, you have more fun.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
He needs to go rub his soul against life.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.
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
The standard approach has been to pump up the dosage of chemicals ... Twenty percent of these approved-for-use pesticides are listed by the EPA as carcinogenic in humans.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
The happiest people are the ones with the most community.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
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
Image
You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don't attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.
Barbara Kingsolver