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I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Notion
Earthly
Conscience
Cradle
Clean
Sail
Habit
Grave
White
Habits
Mind
Graves
People
Snow
Price

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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it takes your sleeping self years to catch up to where you really are. ... when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage.
Barbara Kingsolver
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People ask without wanting to know.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.
Barbara Kingsolver
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A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
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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This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.
Barbara Kingsolver
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It's what you do that makes your soul.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The happiest people are the ones with the most community.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.
Barbara Kingsolver