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Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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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.
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.
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Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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 Kingsolver
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Corn syrup and added fats have been outed as major ingredients in fast food, but they hide out in packaged foods too, even presumed-innocent ones like crackers.
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He hid a scornful smile under his mustache, which is not a good hiding place.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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 Kingsolver
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Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I look at my four boys, who are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Height isn't something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.
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This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.
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How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.
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Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.
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Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger.
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There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.
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With all due respect for the wondrous ways people have invented to amuse themselves and one another on paved surfaces, I find that this exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad. I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant's way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.
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I'm very cautious about appropriating or representing a view I don't have legitimate authority to represent, because I don't want to take the place of someone who could do that better. I don't write characters from a point of view I don't inhabit. My Congo novel is seen through a bunch of white Southern girls. It's my choice, but I make it carefully.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Marriages are made in heaven and consummated on earth.
John Lyly
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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