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Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Transactions
Struck
Attempt
Prayer
Less
Business
Always
Transaction
Glorified

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I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world.
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I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
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Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.
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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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A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.
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Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.
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The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.
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People ask without wanting to know.
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A dog can't think that much about what he's doing, he just does what feels right.
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Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
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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.
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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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There are some who'd hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think's been too lucky.
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The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
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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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If you can't dress expensive, dress memorable.
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I don't look like who I am.
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Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It's more like conversation, raising new questions and inspiring you to answer them for yourself.
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Root out all the to be verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No It was or they are or I am. Don't let it be, make it happen.
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There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.
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