Barbara Quotes

Don't let the bastards get you down.

No matter what age you are, or what your circumstances might be, you are special and you still have something unique to offer. Your life, because of who you are, has meaning.

We are a people in a quandary about the present. We are a people in search of our future. We are a people in search of a national community.

The joy of motherhood: what a mother experiences when all her children are in bed

Don’t let your life speed out of control. Live intentionally. Do something today that will last beyond your lifetime.

People imitate their leader. Lead by example.

Worry is the senseless process of cluttering up tomorrows opportunities with leftover problems from today

We are like violins. We can be used as doorstops, or we can make music.

Jazz can be a blank canvas full of possibilities.

Taking chances almost always makes for happy endings.

When you're building a business, you're either all in, or you're not.

I am not afraid of aging, but more afraid of people's reactions to my aging.

I love my blocks of marble, always piling up in the yard like a flock of sheep.

Mother Earth is giving birth to a co-creative humanity. There's not a majority anywhere, but it's cropping up everywhere, because old leadership does not have the authority to guide us.

Money does not bring happiness' - only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.

To be fully human is perhaps why I'm Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human.

Food is my drug of choice.

Persecution always acts as a jell for members of cults; it proves to them, in the absence of history, liturgy, tradition, and doctrine, that they are God's chosen.

I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.

It is the marketplace that calls most clearly for men to be softer, more narcissistic and receptive, and the new man is the result.

Politics is social work with power.

We, the women of the Senate, with President Obama by our side, will keep fighting - our shoulders square, our lipstick on - because you deserve equal pay for your hard work.

The history of your world is filled with the voice of the victor, the voice of power, although it was not always a voice of sanity, by any means.

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.

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.

In order to experience everyday spirituality, we need to remember that we are spiritual beings spending some time in a human body.

After all, film is so porous, and to my mind, so oddly occult, that I think that film itself absorbs odd energies like a living skin.

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.

We are obliged to steal pieces of language, both visual and textual.

The best time to start giving your children money is when they will no longer eat it. Basically, when they don't put it in their mouths, they can start putting it in their bank.

If you cannot solve it, it is not a problem - it is reality.

Our children need to be able to see us take a stand for a value and against injustices, be those values and injustices in the family room, the boardroom, the classroom, or on the city streets.

I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

The great majority of people in England and America are modest, decent and pure-minded and the amount of virgins in the world today is stupendous.

A wise word is more rare than the green emerald, and one can find the word of wisdom even amongst the slave girls making grain.

I would love to employ a man, but how can I possibly give a man dictation from the bath?

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

Everyone gets the same twenty-four hours in a day, the difference is how you use it.

...nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.

All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary.

If you're having fun, you wind up innovating.

No one is ever a victim, although your conquerors would have you believe in your own victimhood. How else could they conquer you?

Raising five boys is a handful, trust me.

To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born "illegals."

Money alone can't bring you happiness, but money alone has not brought me unhappiness. I won't say my previous husbands thought only of my money, but it had a certain fascination for them.

You don't have to get it right the first time.

It's only too late if you don't start now.

Unkind criticism is never part of a meaningful critique of you. Its purpose is not to teach or to help, its purpose is to punish.

a woman may be called a wife and mother for most of her life, while a man is called a husband and father only at his funeral.

Your people smarts will prove ten times more valuable than all the book smarts you can't get.