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God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Need
Enough
Needs
Long
Punish
Life
Grants
Religious
Religion
Doesn

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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(on asparagus) Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac, and the church banned it from nunneries.
Barbara Kingsolver
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He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I prefer to remain anomalous.
Barbara Kingsolver
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My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head.
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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Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.
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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Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.
Barbara Kingsolver
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There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Maybe life doesn't get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we're willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It's just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.
Barbara Kingsolver
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It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.
Barbara Kingsolver
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We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.
Barbara Kingsolver
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From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.
Barbara Kingsolver
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People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.
Barbara Kingsolver
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... Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, 'so far from everything?' When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.
Barbara Kingsolver
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People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
Barbara Kingsolver