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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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Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.
Barbara Kingsolver
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It's a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Southern Appalachians have been ridiculed since the country began. In fiction, they're usually depicted in a cartoonish manner. The region is poor, and very suspicious of outsiders, so there's a sort of 'us versus them' situation. They're easy to poke fun at.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.
Barbara Kingsolver
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If you can't dress expensive, dress memorable.
Barbara Kingsolver
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...whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. And peace will be with you.
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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I prefer to remain anomalous.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.
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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In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We're surrounded by advertising.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.
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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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