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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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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Ignorance
Balloon
Moral
Awfully
Hard
Balloons
Poke
Superiority
Fill
Hot
Billowing
Air
Combines

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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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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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.
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I write every moment that is humanly possible. I write every day and every night. The only discipline I lack is the discipline is to quit.
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If you're standing in the manure pile, it's somebody's job to mention the stink.
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This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.
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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.
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restraint equals indulgence
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Everything truly important is washable.
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He needs to go rub his soul against life.
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Science doesn't tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.
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The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for!
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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.
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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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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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Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.
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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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You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what's broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it's broken, you are automatically disqualified.
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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.
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What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.
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I think that when people read fiction, they're really reading for wisdom. I am. That's what most of us really love. If we read a novel that rocks our world, it's because there's something in it that we didn't know already. Not just information but really wisdom - sort of what to do with our information. And wisdom comes from experience.
Barbara Kingsolver