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
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.
In practice
In a book club discussion, you might reference this quote to emphasize the importance of diverse literature.
Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.
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.
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.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
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.
We read Charlotte Bronte not for exquisite observation of character - her characters are vigorous and elementary; not for comedy - hers is grim and crude; not for a philosophic view of life - hers is that of a country parson's daughter; but for her poetry. Probably that is so with all writers who have, as she has, an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt.
In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected.
You may translate books of science exactly. ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing.
What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material. And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatize it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully.
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