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Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what's not in it.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Reminding
Cigarette
Empty
Lying
House
Around
Like
Packet

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The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for!
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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.
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Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view.
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We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
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Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.
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I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.
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The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.
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.
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Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used.
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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.
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If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
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If I had to give up my life for anything, it would have to have the resilience of hope, the elation of new literacy, the brilliant life of a field of flowers, the elementary kindness of bread. Nothing short of that. It would have to be something as sure as love.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I believe that the people who survive a cataclysm, rather than those who stand by and analyze it, are nearly always the more credible witnesses to their own history.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I used to think religion was just more of the same thing. Dump responsibility on the big guy. Now I see an importance in that. It's a relief to accept that not everything is under your control.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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
Barbara Kingsolver
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Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
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Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.
Barbara Kingsolver