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Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Illusion
Civilization
Feet
Call
Truth
Pavement
Illusions
Mistaken

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...nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.
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Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.
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I believe with all my heart in delivering on my contract with my readers. They've got plenty of other things to do, so I had better give them a reason to turn every one of these 550 pages. This is my promise: I solemnly swear I'll make you laugh out loud at least once, cry a little in private, and burn whatever you left on the stove.
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He needs to go rub his soul against life.
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I don't bring expectations to any of my books. I don't tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.
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You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they're not self-sufficient.
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Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility
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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.
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He had senile dementia and liked to go outside naked, but he could still do two things perfectly: win at checkers and write out prescriptions.
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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.
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Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence.
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God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.
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It is completely usual for me to get up in the morning, take a look around, and laugh out loud.
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A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.
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...our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The longer you live, the more likely you are to have something to say.
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Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
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But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.
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.
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Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man's skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people's back yards.
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