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The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Impossible
Wrong
Words

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.
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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Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.
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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Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.
Barbara Kingsolver
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It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
Barbara Kingsolver
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You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own.
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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God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
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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People ask without wanting to know.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
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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Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you figure out what you have to say.
Barbara Kingsolver
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A woman without a man -- a condition of 'manlessness' -- is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife.
Barbara Kingsolver
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When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I struggle with confidence, every time. I’m never completely sure I can write another book. Maybe my scope is too grand, my questions too hard, surely readers won’t want to follow me here. A novel is like a cathedral, it knocks you down to size when you enter into it.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what's not in it.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver