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I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Inspirational
Anything
Persons
Smartest
Person
Room
Look
Rooms
Looks
Learning
Trying
Seen
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More quotes by 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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Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Everything truly important is washable.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Americans who read and think are patriots of the first order. The kind who know enough to roll their eyes whenever anyone tries to claim sole custody of the flag and weild it as a blunt instrument. There are as many ways to love America as there are Americans, and our country needs us all.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
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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What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
Barbara Kingsolver
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They all attended Hester's church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.
Barbara Kingsolver
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A flower is a plant's way of making love.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer's block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don't. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.
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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Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.
Barbara Kingsolver
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There's always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It's just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.
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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It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Quit smoking in the hope of growing old. It takes a long time to write. People go to books for wisdom and older authors tend to have more of it.
Barbara Kingsolver