Barbara Quotes

You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.

War so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.

Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.

The past is all we know of the future.

Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.

Mother could go for one year without food, but not one day without her lip sticks.

If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.

For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.

Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn't.

A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.

Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea.

Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.

He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.

I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

You know reviewers, they are the wind in their own sails.

No reporter worth his buttons will let the facts intrude on a good story.

I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them.

Lies are infinite in number, and the truth so small and singular.

Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.

Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.

It is completely usual for me to get up in the morning, take a look around, and laugh out loud.

No kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred.

We tap our toes to chaste love songs about the silvery moon without recognizing them as hymns to copulation.

I've never gotten over high school, to the extent that I'm still a little surprised that my friends want to hang out with me.

I don't *ever* write about real people. Art is supposed to be better than that. If you want a slice of life, look out the window.

Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.

Our plans are small and somewhat absurd.

My way of finding a place in this world is to write one.

It's as if cats live in a seperate universe that takes up the same space as ours, but is full of facinating things like mice or sparrows or special TV programs that we can't see.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view.

The standard approach has been to pump up the dosage of chemicals ... Twenty percent of these approved-for-use pesticides are listed by the EPA as carcinogenic in humans.

The last generation's worst fears became the next one's B-grade entertainment.

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.

When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.

Pay attention to your passions. They are the key to starting and finishing the book you are meant to write. I don't believe in talent. I believe in passion.

There is something in us that loves certain disasters and the fever of this moment and surrendering to that.

I write every moment that is humanly possible. I write every day and every night. The only discipline I lack is the discipline is to quit.

The longer you live, the more likely you are to have something to say.

I have my own sheep and I literally sheer the sheep and knot sweaters for friends and family from scratch.

Quit smoking in the hope of growing old. It takes a long time to write. People go to books for wisdom and older authors tend to have more of it.

Belief is tricky because left to its own devices, it can court a kind of surety, an unquestioning allegiance that fears doubt and destroys difference.

Money talks. It starts rumors about careers and complicity and speaks of the tragedies and triumphs of our social lives.

I think architecture is one of the predominant orderings of social space. It can construct and contain our experiences. It defines our days and nights. It literally puts us in our place.

I like suggesting that ‘we are slaves to the objects around us,’ that ‘plenty should be enough,’ or that the ‘buyer should beware,’ within the context of conventional selling space.

You make history when you do business.

You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.

If I bring up political power, personal power, it sounds like they're my terms, and they're not.

There are so many moments and works that influence us in what we do. Movies, music, TV and, most importantly, the profound everydayness of our lives.