Quote

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.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Wanted
Wait
Done
Produce
Would
Writer
Desk
Learned
Desks
Waiting
Muse
Whether
Chain
Jobs
Chains
Easy
Block

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.
Barbara Kingsolver
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It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
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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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.
Barbara Kingsolver
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It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life.
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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Scientific illiteracy in our populations is leaving too many of us unprepared to discuss or understand much of the damage we are wreaking on our atmosphere, our habitat, and even the food that enters our mouths.
Barbara Kingsolver
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What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.
Barbara Kingsolver
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It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
Barbara Kingsolver
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God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.
Barbara Kingsolver
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As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop.
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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Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they're afraid to plant themselves?
Barbara Kingsolver
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The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering. Yes, maybe we'd like to be able to get places quickly, and carry things in both hands but only because we have to keep up with the rest of you ... We would rather be just like us, and have that be all right.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.
Barbara Kingsolver