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
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.
In practice
A writer might use this quote in a workshop about the impact of storytelling on readers.
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.
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet.
I try never to wear my own clothes, I pretend I'm someone else
All works, no matter what or by whom painted, are nothing but bagatelles and childish trifles... unless they are made and painted from life, and there can be nothing... better than to follow nature.
Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairytale artist.
I would that my photographs might be, not the coverage of a news event, but an indictment of war - the brutal corrupting viciousness of its doing to the minds and bodies of men; and, that my photographs might be a powerful emotional catalyst to the reasoning which would help this vile and criminal stupidity from beginning again.
When my friends and I would act out movies as kids, we'd play the guys' roles, since they had the most interesting things to do. Decades later, I can hardly believe my sons and daughter are seeing many of the same limited choices in current films.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.