Quote

The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually bring down the charming, infuriating naïveté of Americans that allows us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret ugliness that bring us whatever we want.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Language
Americans
Ugliness
Writing
Wall
Cheerful
Something
Nation
Charming
Years
Gets
Consumption
Blithe
Bring
Allows
Infuriating
Secret
Eventually
Vets
Nations
Bigger
Illiterate
Whatever
Ignorance
Consumerism

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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This Forest eats itself and lives forever.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.
Barbara Kingsolver
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In the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I can count all the ways in which being a mother has enriched my understanding of the world, of character, my sense of the future and my attachment to it. I can't imagine what kind of writer I'd be if I didn't have my kids.
Barbara Kingsolver
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If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Maybe life doesn't get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we're willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission, and it is treated with far less consideration.
Barbara Kingsolver
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It's a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Everything truly important is washable.
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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Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don't but we wear it all the same
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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It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past
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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I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it intently political. I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea.
Barbara Kingsolver