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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
Religious
Religion
Doesn
Need
Enough
Needs
Long
Punish
Life
Grants

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they're not self-sufficient.
Barbara Kingsolver
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My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I believe with all my heart in delivering on my contract with my readers. They've got plenty of other things to do, so I had better give them a reason to turn every one of these 550 pages. This is my promise: I solemnly swear I'll make you laugh out loud at least once, cry a little in private, and burn whatever you left on the stove.
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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Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they're afraid to plant themselves?
Barbara Kingsolver
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Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.
Barbara Kingsolver
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A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.
Barbara Kingsolver
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there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I'm concerned that's like accusing a dog of having a bark!
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.
Barbara Kingsolver
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In the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.
Barbara Kingsolver
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If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.
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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... 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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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
Barbara Kingsolver
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In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.
Barbara Kingsolver