Quote

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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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Simple
Precious
Eye
Mirror
Stills
Mirrors
Still
Image
Apiece
Exactly
Scarcity
Prove
Arithmetic
Grew
Proves
Knowing
Sister

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Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.
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Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.
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In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We're surrounded by advertising.
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It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.
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Back then I was still appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting fo the dollies.
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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.
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Nine-tenths of human law is about possession.
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I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.
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I struggle with confidence, every time. I’m never completely sure I can write another book. Maybe my scope is too grand, my questions too hard, surely readers won’t want to follow me here. A novel is like a cathedral, it knocks you down to size when you enter into it.
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You know reviewers, they are the wind in their own sails.
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Root out all the to be verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No It was or they are or I am. Don't let it be, make it happen.
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How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
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It's a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.
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.
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It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
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I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they're feeling because that's how I read the seed catalogs in January.
Barbara Kingsolver
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(on asparagus) Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac, and the church banned it from nunneries.
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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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I don't look like who I am.
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He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.
Barbara Kingsolver