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Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It's peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Anybody
Purpose
Come
Hard
Peacefulness
Intention
Worked

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I don't bring expectations to any of my books. I don't tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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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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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Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don't attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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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I prefer to remain anomalous.
Barbara Kingsolver
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A flower is a plant's way of making love.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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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There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what's broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it's broken, you are automatically disqualified.
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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Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man's skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people's back yards.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver