Barbara Kingsolver Quotes About Giving

Quotes about: Giving

• Mom is losing, no doubt, because our vegetables have come to lack two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. Storage and transport take predictable tolls on the volatile plant compounds that subtly add up to taste and food value. Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to decrease palatability. Bizarre as it seems, we've accepted a tradeoff that amounts to: "Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of its former self."

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Mom, Self, Vegetables

  Barbara Kingsolver (2010). “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Our Year of Seasonal Eating”, p.54, Faber & Faber

• Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Children, Giving, Be Careful

  Barbara Kingsolver (2011). “High Tide in Tucson”, p.69, Faber & Faber

• 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

  Home, Night, Names

  Barbara Kingsolver (2009). “High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never”, p.11, Harper Collins

• But we've all ended up giving body and soul to Africa, one way or another. Even Adah, who's becoming an expert in tropical epidemiology and strange new viruses. Each of us got our heart buried in six feet of African dirt; we are all co-conspirators here. I mean, all of us, not just my family. So what do you do now? You get to find your own way to dig out a heart and shake it off and hold it up to the light again.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Heart, Mean, Light

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

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Giving Up, Giving, Giving Up On Love

  Barbara Kingsolver (2009). “The Lacuna”, p.566, Faber & Faber

• If my setting is new to a reader, or the concerns of the novel are new, I hope they will learn something about the world. I would like to say that they can trust that what they do learn in the novel will be accurate, because I pay a lot of attention to facts. I do a lot of research to make sure that I'm not giving them, you know, blue moons of Jupiter. It's not science fiction.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Moon, Blue, Giving

• 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

  Believe, Heart, Giving

  "Author interview: Barbara Kingsolver". www.librarything.com. October 1, 2008.

• A novel can educate to some extent, but first a novel has to entertain. That's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page. I have a commitment to accessibility. I believe in plot. I want an English professor to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want the people I grew up with - who may not often read anything but the Sears catalog - to read my books.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Believe, Book, Commitment

• When the scope of the problem seems insuperable, isn't it time to call this one, give it up, and get on with life as we know it. I do know that answer to that one: that's called child abuse. When my teenager worries that her generation won't be able to fix this problem, I have to admit to her that it won't be up to her generation. It's up to mine. This is a now-or-never kind of project.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Children, Teenager, Giving

• I've always seen the world through the eyes of a scientist. I love the predictable outcomes that science gives us, the control over the world that that can render.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Eye, Giving, World

• Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn't it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Kids, Civilization, Two

• In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career - my anti-job - that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Jobs, Stress, Careers

• If I had to give up my life for anything, it would have to have the resilience of hope, the elation of new literacy, the brilliant life of a field of flowers, the elementary kindness of bread. Nothing short of that. It would have to be something as sure as love.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Giving Up, Kindness, Flower

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