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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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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Better
Motherhood
Right
Surely
Long
Stay
Needed
Jobs
Running
Mother
Mama
Kids
Parenting

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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Last time I talked to her she didn't sound like herself. She's depressed. It's awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they're no good.
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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.
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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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Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.
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Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need
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A flower is a plant's way of making love.
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there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I'm concerned that's like accusing a dog of having a bark!
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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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it takes your sleeping self years to catch up to where you really are. ... when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness.
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I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.
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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This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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They all attended Hester's church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.
Barbara Kingsolver
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My way of finding a place in this world is to write one.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.
Barbara Kingsolver
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No matter what kind of night you're having, morning always wins.
Barbara Kingsolver
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There is something in us that loves certain disasters and the fever of this moment and surrendering to that.
Barbara Kingsolver