Quote

I can count all the ways in which being a mother has enriched my understanding of the world, of character, my sense of the future and my attachment to it. I can't imagine what kind of writer I'd be if I didn't have my kids.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Character
Ways
Kind
Imagine
Way
Understanding
World
Future
Sense
Enriched
Mother
Attachment
Didn
Count
Kids
Writer

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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If I had to give up my life for anything, it would have to have the resilience of hope, the elation of new literacy, the brilliant life of a field of flowers, the elementary kindness of bread. Nothing short of that. It would have to be something as sure as love.
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I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
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I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
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I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.
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You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they're not self-sufficient.
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Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.
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Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
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You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what's broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it's broken, you are automatically disqualified.
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The last generation's worst fears became the next one's B-grade entertainment.
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What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.
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As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop.
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The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.
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A woman without a man -- a condition of 'manlessness' -- is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife.
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God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.
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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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...our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.
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If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
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When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.
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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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School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
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