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The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Curse
Gods
Pay
Ones
Best

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.
Barbara Kingsolver
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If you're standing in the manure pile, it's somebody's job to mention the stink.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
Barbara Kingsolver
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It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
Barbara Kingsolver
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If someone does learn about the world from reading a novel of mine, that makes me very happy. It's probably not what brings me into the novel in the first place - I usually am pulled in by some big question about the world and human nature that I'm not going to resolve in the course of the novel. But I'm very devoted to getting my facts straight.
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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Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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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It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
Barbara Kingsolver
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...nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.
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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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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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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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It's more like conversation, raising new questions and inspiring you to answer them for yourself.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
Barbara Kingsolver