Quote

A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.

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
Terror
Lifetime
Spend
Didn
Persons
Person
Things
Retrospective
Thinking
Nearly

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

Image
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
Image
A flower is your cousin...Sometimes a person has got to take a life, like a chicken's or a hog's when you need it...But nobody is so hungry they need to kill a flower. Cherokee great-grandmother
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
He had senile dementia and liked to go outside naked, but he could still do two things perfectly: win at checkers and write out prescriptions.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Scientific illiteracy in our populations is leaving too many of us unprepared to discuss or understand much of the damage we are wreaking on our atmosphere, our habitat, and even the food that enters our mouths.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.
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
Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
Do you think its possible to live without wanting to put your name on your paintings? To belong to a group so securely you don't need to rise above it?
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
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
He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.
Barbara Kingsolver
Image
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for!
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
I prefer to remain anomalous.
Barbara Kingsolver