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Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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If you never stepped on anybody's toes, you never been for a walk.
Barbara Kingsolver
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You know reviewers, they are the wind in their own sails.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The standard approach has been to pump up the dosage of chemicals... Twenty percent of these approved-for-use pesticides are listed by the EPA as carcinogenic in humans.
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A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, so people imagine a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had. But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know.
Barbara Kingsolver
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He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.
Barbara Kingsolver
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A meaningless phrase repeated again and again begins to resemble truth.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Hallie and I... were all there was. The image in the mirror that proves you are still here. We had exactly one sister apiece. We grew up knowing the simple arithmetic of scarcity: A sister is more precious than an eye.
Barbara Kingsolver
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A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.
Barbara Kingsolver
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No matter what kind of night you're having, morning always wins.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I believe that the people who survive a cataclysm, rather than those who stand by and analyze it, are nearly always the more credible witnesses to their own history.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering. Yes, maybe we'd like to be able to get places quickly, and carry things in both hands but only because we have to keep up with the rest of you... We would rather be just like us, and have that be all right.
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Children model the behavior of adults, on whatever scale is available to them. Ours are growing up in a nation whose most important, influential men - from presidents to the coolest film characters - solve problems by killing people.... We have taught our children in a thousand ways, sometimes with flag-waving and sometimes with a laugh track, that the bad guy deserves to die.
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Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.
Barbara Kingsolver
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If you're standing in the manure pile, it's somebody's job to mention the stink.
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It's tough to break yourself as news to a town that already knows you.
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In exchange for his first taste of powdered milk, Pascal showed me a tree we could climb to find a bird's nest. After we handled and examined the pink-skinned baby birds, he popped one of them into his mouth like a jujube. It seemed to please him a lot. He offered a baby bird to me, pantomiming that I should eat it. I understood perfectly well what he meant, but I refused. He did not seem disappointed to have to eat the whole brood himself.
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Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence.
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Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view.
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A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't this world would end at once.
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Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.
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You think you're the foreigner here, and I'm the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that... to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner, too.
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Respecting the dignity of a spectacular food means enjoying it at its best. Europeans celebrate the short season of abundant asparagus as a form of holiday. In the Netherlands the first cutting coincides with Father's Day, on which restaurants may feature all-asparagus menus and hand out neckties decorated with asparagus spears.
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How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
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I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they're feeling because that's how I read the seed catalogs in January.
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Barbara Kingsolver
Born:
April 8, 1955
(age 69)
Bio:
Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood.
Known for:
The Poisonwood Bible (1998)
Flight Behavior (2012)
The Bean Trees (1988)
The Lacuna (2009)
Prodigal Summer: A Novel (2000)
Most used words:
life
people
love
time
day
person
child
small
live
human
kind
food
bad
god
understand
Barbara Kingsolver on Wikipedia
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