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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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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Understand
Turning
Often
Leaving
Write
Discipline
Else
Computer
Writing
Begin
Thing
Question
Something
Asks
Desk
People
Funny
Desks

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Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.
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Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.
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A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever.
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Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.
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How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
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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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If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.
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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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I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
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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.
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Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.
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Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.
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There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.
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If it's important, your heart remembers.
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Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn't.
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Scientific illiteracy in our populations is leaving too many of us unprepared to discuss or understand much of the damage we are wreaking on our atmosphere, our habitat, and even the food that enters our mouths.
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I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.
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my own relationships with the animals in my life are absurdly complex: Some I love, some I eat, and the scraps left over from the ones I eat, I feed to the ones I love.
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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.
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You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don't attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.
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