Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Imagination is essential for creativity, and it requires consistent effort to bring ideas to life.
This quote emphasizes the importance of imagination in the creative process while also highlighting the need for discipline and hard work. Barbara Kingsolver suggests that inspiration does not come solely from a moment of creativity; rather, it is achieved through a diligent daily practice, even amidst other responsibilities.
Themes
ImaginationCreativityDisciplineHard WorkInspiration
In practice
Example use cases
During a creative writing workshop, I shared this quote to emphasize the importance of daily writing practices.
More from Barbara Kingsolver
All quotes →Children 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
Similar quotes
There is a communication of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk. And that is my answer when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love.
M. F. K. FisherRead
A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.
Miriam ToewsRead
The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.
Stephane MallarmeRead
I believe in previous lives and the Muse—and that books and music exist before they are written and that they are propelled into material being by their own imperative to be born, via the offices of those willing servants of discipline, imagination and inspiration whom we call artists.
Steven PressfieldRead
I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.'
Friedrich NietzscheRead
Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead