Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Most every book I bring into the world is like birthing a baby; it's a lot of effort!
Interpretation
What this quote means
Creating a book is a labor-intensive process akin to giving birth, requiring significant effort and dedication.
In this quote, Barbara Kingsolver compares the process of writing a book to birthing a baby, highlighting the immense emotional and physical energy invested in creating literature. Just as childbirth involves struggles and triumphs, so too does the journey of an author as they bring their ideas and stories to life, underscoring the passion and commitment that fuels the creative process.
Themes
WritingCreationEffortLaborArt
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of creative expression, one might use this quote to illustrate the dedication of writers.
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
Similar quotes
With all the new media outlets out there, with all the noise, a voice of authority and calm like Vogue becomes more important than ever. The more eyes on fashion, the more opinions about fashion, the more exploration of fashion around the world, the better it is for Vogue. Vogue is like Nike or Coca-Colaβthis huge global brand. I want to enhance it, I want to protect it, and I want it to be part of the conversation.
Anna WintourRead
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
William StaffordRead
O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.
Virginia WoolfRead
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.
Charles BaudelaireRead
[Comedies], in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. ...Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms...
Joseph CampbellRead
The fun for me musically is that you never quite know what works and why. So why pretend you do? Why not just put things together and discover, in the creative process, if and why they work? That approach has served me well.
Thomas NewmanRead