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Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Create
Essays
Theoretical
Empathy
Stranger
Fiction

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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I think that when people read fiction, they're really reading for wisdom. I am. That's what most of us really love. If we read a novel that rocks our world, it's because there's something in it that we didn't know already. Not just information but really wisdom - sort of what to do with our information. And wisdom comes from experience.
Barbara Kingsolver
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There are some who'd hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think's been too lucky.
Barbara Kingsolver
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My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.
Barbara Kingsolver
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We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
Barbara Kingsolver
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there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I'm concerned that's like accusing a dog of having a bark!
Barbara Kingsolver
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If it's important, your heart remembers.
Barbara Kingsolver
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He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.
Barbara Kingsolver
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People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
Barbara Kingsolver
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He had senile dementia and liked to go outside naked, but he could still do two things perfectly: win at checkers and write out prescriptions.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it intently political. I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.
Barbara Kingsolver
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It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
Barbara Kingsolver
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From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.
Barbara Kingsolver
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There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.
Barbara Kingsolver
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A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.
Barbara Kingsolver
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If you're standing in the manure pile, it's somebody's job to mention the stink.
Barbara Kingsolver
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In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career - my anti-job - that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.
Barbara Kingsolver