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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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Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind.
Barbara Kingsolver
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A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.
Barbara Kingsolver
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We agreed with him in principal - we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Everything truly important is washable.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The past is all we know of the future.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I believe with all my heart in delivering on my contract with my readers. They've got plenty of other things to do, so I had better give them a reason to turn every one of these 550 pages. This is my promise: I solemnly swear I'll make you laugh out loud at least once, cry a little in private, and burn whatever you left on the stove.
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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... Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, 'so far from everything?' When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Most of the girls my age, or even younger, have babies. They appear way too young to be married, till you look in their eyes. Then you'll see it. Their eyes look happy and sad at the same time, but unexcited by anything, shifting easily off to the side as if they've already seen most of what there is. Married eyes.
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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Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.
Barbara Kingsolver
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What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need
Barbara Kingsolver
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We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.
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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He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.
Barbara Kingsolver
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People ask without wanting to know.
Barbara Kingsolver