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Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Throw
Hope
Even
Think
Thinking
Penny
People
Pennies
Fountain
Clearly

More quotes by 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.
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Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea.
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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.
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For scientists, reality is not optional.
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I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.
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The happiest people are the ones with the most community.
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Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need
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Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.
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I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.
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Do you think its possible to live without wanting to put your name on your paintings? To belong to a group so securely you don't need to rise above it?
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Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
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I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
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The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually bring down the charming, infuriating naïveté of Americans that allows us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret ugliness that bring us whatever we want.
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A flower is your cousin...Sometimes a person has got to take a life, like a chicken's or a hog's when you need it...But nobody is so hungry they need to kill a flower. Cherokee great-grandmother
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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.
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My worst nightmare is being stuck somewhere with nothing to read.
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Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.
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Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their skulls and onto paper.
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Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.
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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.
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