Barbara Quotes
All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.
I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?
Parenting is something that happens mostly while you're thinking of something else.
The first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see. Presumably the unselfish motives will follow as we wise up.
I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.
How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.
Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.
What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.
But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.
The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.
A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.
It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.
My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.
Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.
The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business...I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.
I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.
I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
I don't bring expectations to any of my books. I don't tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.
As a biologist, I can't think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.
After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.
Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.
There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.
I used to think religion was just more of the same thing. Dump responsibility on the big guy. Now I see an importance in that. It's a relief to accept that not everything is under your control.
Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage.
There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.
Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.
When people are frightened about going hungry and paying their mortgages, a scarcity model begins to prevail; they fear someone else will get their piece of the pie.
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.
I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other.
I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.
she's never forgotten, either, how a mystery caught in the hand could lose its grace
Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.
Do you think its possible to live without wanting to put your name on your paintings? To belong to a group so securely you don't need to rise above it?
