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
People
History
Blades
Ends
Knife
Anything
Knives
Enough
Edge
Hard
Edges
Even
Calling
Slicing
Kind
Close
Blade
Time
Stand
Bend

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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We agreed with him in principal - we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.
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I prefer to remain anomalous.
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I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it intently political. I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.
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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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Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair.
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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.
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Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
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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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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Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past
Barbara Kingsolver
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Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind.
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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Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.
Barbara Kingsolver
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There are some who'd hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think's been too lucky.
Barbara Kingsolver
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He needs to go rub his soul against life.
Barbara Kingsolver
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you can't really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece
Barbara Kingsolver
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A woman without a man -- a condition of 'manlessness' -- is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife.
Barbara Kingsolver