Quote

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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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Culture
Chipping
Experience
Flint
Might
Rubbing
Human
Sparks
Humans
Cultures
Come
Parts
Think
Sort
Thinking
Interesting

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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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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Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used.
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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.
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It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
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If someone does learn about the world from reading a novel of mine, that makes me very happy. It's probably not what brings me into the novel in the first place - I usually am pulled in by some big question about the world and human nature that I'm not going to resolve in the course of the novel. But I'm very devoted to getting my facts straight.
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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.
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When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven
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Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission, and it is treated with far less consideration.
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In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.
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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.
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Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
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It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life.
Barbara Kingsolver
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...our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they are missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven.
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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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Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility
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It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.
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Americans who read and think are patriots of the first order. The kind who know enough to roll their eyes whenever anyone tries to claim sole custody of the flag and weild it as a blunt instrument. There are as many ways to love America as there are Americans, and our country needs us all.
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Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Morning always comes.
Barbara Kingsolver