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
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If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical.
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A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
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A painting is nothing more than light reflected from the surface of a pigment-covered canvas. But a great painter can make you see the depth, make you feel the underlying emotion, make you sense the larger world. That, too, is the power of science: to sense and convey the depth and dimensionality of nature, to glance at the surface and to divine the shape of the universe around us.
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I always thought I'd eventually learn how to draw really well, and despite constant evidence to the contrary, I just kept on trying. If you're too good at anything, you don't have to think about the process, whereas I feel like I spend my life with my head under the bonnet, trying to understand how everything works.
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It's a constant challenge to get your arrangement and musical expression across to a new audience, especially when you're playing live every night like we are.
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