Barbara Quotes

You want to make a representative selection, but at the same time, you want to give a sense of the whole project. I have this big conflict in my writing life that I'm trying to work out all the time.

For some reason I seem to absorb the landscape and cultures where I am planted. A State Divided Symphony was inspired by the 150th anniversary of Missouri's entry into the Civil War.

For my qualifying concert, Helmut Walcha would not coach Charles-Marie Widor or any American compositions. In his defense, his forte was Germanic composers, and his forte was really a fortissimo!

We measure success and depth by length of time, but it is possible to have a deep relationship that doesn't always stay the same.

It's also very painful, because I feel, and I know, probably all women my age and older feel like we're better and have more to give and are more fun now.

moral indignation is a pleasure, often the only pleasure, in many lives. It's also one of the few pleasures people feel obliged to force on other people.

In the taverns all was amiable and easy, but the coffeehouses were cauldrons of edgy malcontents.

To extract the fullest flavor of our drinking house, we needed to spend serious evening time there, slowly coming to know the bartender and the regulars, their joys and sorrows.

The United States government, in figuring our gross national product, defines 'durable goods' as anything that will last three years.

My friends and I were all deathly afraid of our fathers, which was right and proper and even biblically ordained. Fathers were angry; it was their job.

The nostalgic notion of the family orchards is lovely - all that wholesome fruit for our forebears to sit on the back steps biting into - but basically we were growing it to drink.

Smiting enemies has always been so admired that, unlike medicine or archaeology, it entitled its successful practitioners to become kings, emperors, and presidents.

Success in war was the only success that counted; failure was a disgrace to be wiped out only by starting another war and winning it.

Single life should be experimental in nature and open to accidents. Some accidents are happy ones.

Our Revolution was born and raised in taverns.

In the metropolitan haunts of the highly sophisticated, the cocktail is no longer an instrument of friendship but a competitive fashion statement, or one-upmanship.

Exercise, to qualify at all, must be lonely, painfu, humorless, and boring.

A catless writer is almost inconceivable.

In a proper pub everyone there is potentially, if not a lifelong friend, at least someone to lure into an argument about foreign policy or the Red Sox.

Perhaps it's a good time to reconsider pleasure at its roots. Changing out of wet shoes and socks, for instance.

Sophistication called for a variety of talents and attitudes, but the minimum requirement was being in New York. Not all New Yorkers achieved it, but nobody elsewhere had a prayer.

No doubt about it, solitude is improved by being voluntary.

We're a shifty, sliding population. ... What we refer to as 'home' may be a place we haven't seen in years; a place where there's no one left who knows our name.

Almost any dog thinks almost any human is the Great Spirit, the Primal Creator, and the Universal Force Behind the Sun and Tides. What human can resist?

I'm back into fashion which is great! Because they do all the terrible work of production for me.

Things in the margins, including humans who wander there, are often on the brink of becoming someone else, or something else, whose memory may not include the significance of old markers.

Creativity is not being afraid to be different. It takes madness to jump at an idea that no one else believes in.

Jazz is the art of thinking out loud.

Ideas come through us, not from us.

Imagination needs to be fed.

When we have hope, we are showing that we trust God to work out the situation. Trust is the only way we're going to make it through and be a part of God's marvelous plan for His child.

I think living to be one hundred would be great, but living to fifty twice would be so much better.

Your face is a billboard advertising your philosophy of life!

We spend our lives dreaming of the future, not realizing that a little of it slips away every day.

Old florists never die. They just make other arrangements.

Smile...it kills time between disasters.

The stakes ... are too high for government to be a spectator sport.

Things which matter cost money, and we've got to spend the money if we do not want to have generations of parasites rather than generations of productive citizens.

If you're going to play the game [politics] properly, you'd better know every rule.

I never wanted to be run of the mill.

[It is] one of the most complex and emotional issues of out time.

Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It's peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.

Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you're contagious.

Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.

She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on.

You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.

They all attended Hester's church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.

There's always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.

Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.

I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.