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Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Speak
Advantages
Shows
Deaf
Many
Limitations
Make
Minded
People
Limitation
Advantage
Promptly
Silence
Presume
Show
Feeble

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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Memories do not always soften with time some grow edges like knives.
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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.
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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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In the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.
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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.
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God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually bring down the charming, infuriating naïveté of Americans that allows us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret ugliness that bring us whatever we want.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Like Daniel she enteres the lions' den, but lacking Daniel's pure and unblemished soul, Ada is spiced with the flavors of vice that make for a tasty meal. Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.
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In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career - my anti-job - that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.
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Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.
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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Everything truly important is washable.
Barbara Kingsolver
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You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they're not self-sufficient.
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 think that when people read fiction, they're really reading for wisdom. I am. That's what most of us really love. If we read a novel that rocks our world, it's because there's something in it that we didn't know already. Not just information but really wisdom - sort of what to do with our information. And wisdom comes from experience.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.
Barbara Kingsolver
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a meaningless phrase repeated again and again begins to resemble truth.
Barbara Kingsolver
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This Forest eats itself and lives forever.
Barbara Kingsolver
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If someone does learn about the world from reading a novel of mine, that makes me very happy. It's probably not what brings me into the novel in the first place - I usually am pulled in by some big question about the world and human nature that I'm not going to resolve in the course of the novel. But I'm very devoted to getting my facts straight.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past
Barbara Kingsolver