Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Literature fosters understanding and compassion for people we don't know personally.
In her quote, Barbara Kingsolver highlights the power of fiction and essays to bridge the emotional gap between individuals. By engaging with written narratives, readers can cultivate empathy for those who may be vastly different from themselves, expanding their understanding of the human experience beyond their immediate circle.
Themes
EmpathyLiteratureUnderstandingFictionEssays
In practice
Example use cases
In a book club discussion, you might reference this quote to emphasize the importance of diverse literature.
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
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Only in the mystery novel are we delivered final and unquestionable solutions. The joke to me is that fiction gives you a truth that reality can't deliver.
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Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories? Doesn't every narrative lead back to Oedipus? Isn't storytelling always a way of searching for one's origin, speaking one's conflicts with the Law, entering into the dialectic of tenderness and hatred?
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Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of a human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed
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When we're done with it, we may find—if it's a good novel—that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before.
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