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
Similar quotes
My only job is to write in such a way that the reader gets a new handle on humanity.
Thomas SteinbeckRead
In school I was in the dark room all the time, and I've always collected stray photographs; there's a great deal of memory in them.
W. G. SebaldRead
When you have the best and tastiest ingredients, you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is.
Alice WatersRead
I got out of the Army - in my world - I came to New York, for instance, when the civil rights movement was just beginning, and that created a certain energy, a certain rumble, a certain impetus for black actors.
James Earl JonesRead
White, older showrunners told me, 'Why do you want to hire an all-Latinx writers room? Hire who's best for the show - don't get caught up in that.' And I was like, 'No.' For such an intimate show about the details of a culture? You can't fake that. The room needs to reflect the makeup of the show.
Tanya SarachoRead
I want to sound like an instrument. I want my voice and my words to marry the beat. I go with the rhythm of it and the words start to come to my mind and those words could be based on things that's been on my mind for the past year, the past month, the past week, whatever; I write it.
NasRead