Quote

In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Long
Spend
Minutes
Entanglements
Rest
Entanglement
Days
Humming
Passion
Tune
Looking
Tunes
Running
Fifteen
Back
Total

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Science doesn't tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.
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High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.
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My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.
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Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.
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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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I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.
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Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.
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I don't look like who I am.
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... Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, 'so far from everything?' When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.
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God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.
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In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We're surrounded by advertising.
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Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.
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If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.
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One of the very first things I figured out about life...is that it's better to be a hopeful person than a cynical, grumpy one, because you have to live in the same world either way, and if you're hopeful, you have more fun.
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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 have my own sheep and I literally sheer the sheep and knot sweaters for friends and family from scratch.
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The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.
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Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.
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It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
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Hallie and I... were all there was. The image in the mirror that proves you are still here. We had exactly one sister apiece. We grew up knowing the simple arithmetic of scarcity: A sister is more precious than an eye.
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