Barbara Quotes

Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.

Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.

I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.

We agreed with him in principal - we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission, and it is treated with far less consideration.

School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history... Listen being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.

Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.

Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.

there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I'm concerned that's like accusing a dog of having a bark!

Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.

From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.

Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need

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.

The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.

You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they're not self-sufficient.

Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don't; but we wear it all the same

I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.

It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us everyday.

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.

Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he's entitled to joy rather than submission?

He needs to go rub his soul against life.

Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.

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

I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political.

The reason most people have kids is because they get pregnant.

The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.

Everything truly important is washable.

Once the rains abated, my father's garden thrived in the heat like an unleashed temper.

In the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.

Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise.

A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.

It's tough to break yourself as news to a town that already knows you.

Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.

Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.

I don't look like who I am.

I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.

The things I carry closest to my heart are things I can't own.

What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?

my own relationships with the animals in my life are absurdly complex: Some I love, some I eat, and the scraps left over from the ones I eat, I feed to the ones I love.

That's how it is: some people are content to wait till you ask, while others jump right in with the whole story.

A woman without a man -- a condition of 'manlessness' -- is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife.

I believe that the people who survive a cataclysm, rather than those who stand by and analyze it, are nearly always the more credible witnesses to their own history.

It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life.

Nine-tenths of human law is about possession.

Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.

A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't this world would end at once.

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their skulls and onto paper.