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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

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Life
Choices
Solemn
Born
Bound
Living
Bounds
Death
Price
Keep
Survival
Earth
Promise
Every
Choice
Something
Pay

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you figure out what you have to say.
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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Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
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Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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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Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.
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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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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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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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Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their skulls and onto paper.
Barbara Kingsolver
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People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.
Barbara Kingsolver
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A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.
Barbara Kingsolver
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If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.
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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Hallie and I... were all there was. The image in the mirror that proves you are still here. We had exactly one sister apiece. We grew up knowing the simple arithmetic of scarcity: A sister is more precious than an eye.
Barbara Kingsolver
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A flower is a plant's way of making love.
Barbara Kingsolver
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...our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.
Barbara Kingsolver
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You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver