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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.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Things
Love
Inventing
Life
Pointless
Dread
Foolish
Losing
Loss
Business

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Most of the girls my age, or even younger, have babies. They appear way too young to be married, till you look in their eyes. Then you'll see it. Their eyes look happy and sad at the same time, but unexcited by anything, shifting easily off to the side as if they've already seen most of what there is. Married eyes.
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We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Morning always comes.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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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...our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The past is all we know of the future.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for!
Barbara Kingsolver
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Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
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 substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.
Barbara Kingsolver
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My worst nightmare is being stuck somewhere with nothing to read.
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head.
Barbara Kingsolver
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People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Southern Appalachians have been ridiculed since the country began. In fiction, they're usually depicted in a cartoonish manner. The region is poor, and very suspicious of outsiders, so there's a sort of 'us versus them' situation. They're easy to poke fun at.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.
Barbara Kingsolver
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It's a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.
Barbara Kingsolver