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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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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Empathy
Behave
Necessarily
Creation
Influence
Literature
Sucks
Another
Psyche
People
Influences

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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...nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.
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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Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.
Barbara Kingsolver
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A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
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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...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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Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.
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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Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.
Barbara Kingsolver
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In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Maybe life doesn't get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we're willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.
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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From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.
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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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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What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I’m not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.
Barbara Kingsolver
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it takes your sleeping self years to catch up to where you really are. ... when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer's block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don't. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.
Barbara Kingsolver