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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
Ones
Best
Curse
Gods
Pay

More quotes by 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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There is something in us that loves certain disasters and the fever of this moment and surrendering to that.
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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I can count all the ways in which being a mother has enriched my understanding of the world, of character, my sense of the future and my attachment to it. I can't imagine what kind of writer I'd be if I didn't have my kids.
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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I don't look like who I am.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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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The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually bring down the charming, infuriating naïveté of Americans that allows us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret ugliness that bring us whatever we want.
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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Southern Appalachians have been ridiculed since the country began. In fiction, they're usually depicted in a cartoonish manner. The region is poor, and very suspicious of outsiders, so there's a sort of 'us versus them' situation. They're easy to poke fun at.
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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The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The way I see it, a person isn't nothing more than a scarecrow... The only difference between one that stands up good and one that blows over is what kind of a stick they're stuck up there on.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.
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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If you're standing in the manure pile, it's somebody's job to mention the stink.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.
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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I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I was afflicted with Africa like a bout of a rare disease from which I have not managed a full recovery.
Barbara Kingsolver