Quote

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.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Even
Calling
Slicing
Kind
Close
Blade
Time
Stand
Bend
People
History
Blades
Ends
Knife
Anything
Knives
Enough
Edge
Hard
Edges

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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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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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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Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.
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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For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.
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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Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you're contagious.
Barbara Kingsolver
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In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.
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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Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!
Barbara Kingsolver
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the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners
Barbara Kingsolver
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It is completely usual for me to get up in the morning, take a look around, and laugh out loud.
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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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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My way of finding a place in this world is to write one.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
Barbara Kingsolver
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How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world.
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