35 Inspirational Barbara Kingsolver Quotes On Success

Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood. Kingsolver earned degrees in biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a non-fiction account of her family’s attempts to eat locally. May these Barbara Kingsolver Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.

1. “Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.” Barbara Kingsolver

2. “If you can’t dress expensive, dress memorable.” Barbara Kingsolver

3. “The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.” Barbara Kingsolver

4. “It’s what you do that makes your soul.” Barbara Kingsolver

5. “There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.” Barbara Kingsolver

6. “Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.” Barbara Kingsolver

7. “Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.” Barbara Kingsolver

8. “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

9. “Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you, figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.” Barbara Kingsolver

10. “Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!” Barbara Kingsolver

11. “Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.” Barbara Kingsolver

12. “That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don’t know how a person could ever describe that scent.” Barbara Kingsolver

13. “In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again(15).” Barbara Kingsolver

14. “Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It’s more like conversation, raising new questions and inspiring you to answer them for yourself.” Barbara Kingsolver

15. “I’m never going to tell the reader what to believe, I’m going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.” Barbara Kingsolver

16. “Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.” Barbara Kingsolver

17. “To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another, that is surely the basic instinct. Baser even than hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty. If the whole world of the living has to turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers.” Barbara Kingsolver

18. “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

19. “Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it’s going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.” Barbara Kingsolver

20. “Nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.” Barbara Kingsolver

21. “The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.” Barbara Kingsolver

22. “Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you, figure out what you have to say.” Barbara Kingsolver

23. “Human manners are wildly inconsistent, plenty of people have said so. But this one takes the cake: the manner in which we’re allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point that out. The conspicious consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spirtual error, or even bad manners.” Barbara Kingsolver

24. “In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.” Barbara Kingsolver

25. “Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.” Barbara Kingsolver

26. “You don’t think you’ll live past it and you don’t really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that’s still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.” Barbara Kingsolver

27. “A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.” Barbara Kingsolver

28. “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.” Barbara Kingsolver

29. “Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used.” Barbara Kingsolver

30. “You can’t replace people you love with other people. But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.” Barbara Kingsolver

31. “I’m of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.” Barbara Kingsolver

32. “Growing food was the first activity that gave us enough prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories, and build our cities.” Barbara Kingsolver

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

I hope you enjoyed these Barbara Kingsolver Quotes On Success. Do let us know which one was your favorite in the comments section below.

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