Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Writers have the power to connect readers to their own human experiences and emotions.
In this quote, Barbara Kingsolver highlights the transformative ability of writers, particularly those of fiction, poetry, and essays, to evoke and reignite a sense of humanity within their readers. Through storytelling and creative expression, writers can remind individuals of their shared experiences, emotions, and the deeper aspects of what it means to be human, fostering empathy and self-reflection.
Themes
WriterHumanityConnectionEmotionCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
A writer might use this quote in a workshop about the impact of storytelling on readers.
More from Barbara Kingsolver
All quotes βChildren can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.
Barbara KingsolverRead
I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
Barbara KingsolverRead
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.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.
Barbara KingsolverRead
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People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.'
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I love acting. Oh, God, I love it. But all this fame and all this bullshit attention. I'm not supernatural. I've done nothing extremely special to deserve the position. It happens every couple of years, and it's happened to hundreds of people before me.
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I think, when I write, one of the things that I'm really attempting to do is I'm attempting to humanize my characters.
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It's tricky when you're doing a recording, because the only weapon you have is your voice and the delivery of that voice. You don't have a gesture or a facial expression, there are no costumes or set pieces. Everything needs to be present in the voice.
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Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.
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Rock is my child and my grandfather.
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