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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.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Person
Trained
Writing
Novelists
Rare
Contemporary
Scientist
Fiction
Science
Writes
Persons
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More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.
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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Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.
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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I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
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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They all attended Hester's church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.
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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But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.
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 struggle with confidence, every time. I’m never completely sure I can write another book. Maybe my scope is too grand, my questions too hard, surely readers won’t want to follow me here. A novel is like a cathedral, it knocks you down to size when you enter into it.
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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It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.
Barbara Kingsolver
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There is something in us that loves certain disasters and the fever of this moment and surrendering to that.
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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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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The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Root out all the to be verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No It was or they are or I am. Don't let it be, make it happen.
Barbara Kingsolver