Barbara Quotes

Our nannas are losers.

I imagine the proverb about too many cooks spoiling the broth can be applied to writing as well as anything else. The poetical or literary broth is better cooked by one person.

It was odd how one found oneself making trivial conversation on important occasions. Perhaps it was because one could not say what was really in one's mind.

Novel writing is a kind of private pleasure, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms.

Maybe that was the secret of happiness--not expecting any one thing to last forever.

Take assertiveness training, get paid what you're worth, join a consciousness raising-group.

Good habits were the easiest ones to break.

Someone once said you could tell the people who were in the most successful relationships by the bite marks on their tongues.

If you don't know how you feel, you won't know what you want.

You cannot tell your heart what it wants. Your heart will tell you

Originality is genius. If you respect and care for it, it will take you on the ride of your life.

A good work is a partnership between you and nature... Nature will help you every step of the way.

If you truly feared failure, you'd be very successful.

What you want is what you need. Your dearest wish comes straight from your core, loaded with vital information about who you are and who you can become.

Your creativity is waiting for you like a dancing partner.

Find what you love, because greatness is based on great gifts. If you love something, you can count on the fact that you are genetically gifted at it.

The environment that creates winners is almost always made up of winners.

A goal is the basic unit of life design.

Isolation is the dream killer.

Each destination you reach only opens out into wider horizons, new and undiscovered countries for you to explore.

Being judgmental about your own behavior is actually another cop-out because it makes you feel as though you're doing something virtuous.

To imagine that God wants prayers and hymns of praise is to make him out to a sort of oriental potentate; while praying for favours is an attempt to get him to change his allegedly all-wise mind.

As for an eternity in heaven - that would be hell!

To imagine that "God moves in mysterious ways" is to put up a smokescreen of mystery behind which fantasy may survive in spite of all the facts.

I didn't have any agent; I've never had an agent.

I don't have an objective overview of Black Sunday.

Funding from rich countries to help the poor and vulnerable adapt to climate change is not even one percent of what is needed. This glaring injustice must be addressed at Copenhagen in December .

Despite the fact that the world produces enough food to feed everyone, there are more hungry people today than when the world last met in Rio in 1992.

If anyone asks me whether I like being a popular writer, I ask them whether they think I'd rather be an unpopular writer.

Edwina always enjoyed a morning ride. Some mornings she rode the horse, and some mornings she rode the groom.

What is done can never be undone.

If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.

Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.

When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.

In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by contempt for the law.

The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.

I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.

No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead.

When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down.

Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.

That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

Fateful moments tend to evoke grandeur of speech, especially in French.

If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?

The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.

[T]he obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death.

The conduct of war was so much more interesting than its prevention.

Completeness is rare in history.

No nation in the world has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel.

Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.