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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
Illusions
Mistaken
Illusion
Civilization
Feet
Call
Truth
Pavement

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This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.
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A dog can't think that much about what he's doing, he just does what feels right.
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Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.
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When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven
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It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
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Scientific illiteracy in our populations is leaving too many of us unprepared to discuss or understand much of the damage we are wreaking on our atmosphere, our habitat, and even the food that enters our mouths.
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A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.
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The last generation's worst fears became the next one's B-grade entertainment.
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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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There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
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There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.
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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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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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It's very important to distinguish between innocence and naivete. The innocent do not deserve to be the victims of violence. But only the naive refuse to think about the origins of violence and to pursue the possibility that the genesis of that hatred could be addressed.
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In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.
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I have my own sheep and I literally sheer the sheep and knot sweaters for friends and family from scratch.
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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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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.
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A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.
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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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