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This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Someone
Must
Something
Deserved
Believe
Disaster
Think
Americans
Thinking
Terrible
Trouble
Happens

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Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
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A flower is your cousin...Sometimes a person has got to take a life, like a chicken's or a hog's when you need it...But nobody is so hungry they need to kill a flower. Cherokee great-grandmother
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Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
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Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.
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Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.
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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.
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We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.
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A flower is a plant's way of making love.
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I believe with all my heart in delivering on my contract with my readers. They've got plenty of other things to do, so I had better give them a reason to turn every one of these 550 pages. This is my promise: I solemnly swear I'll make you laugh out loud at least once, cry a little in private, and burn whatever you left on the stove.
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The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.
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You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they're not self-sufficient.
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He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.
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But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.
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Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.
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Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
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This Forest eats itself and lives forever.
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To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.
Barbara Kingsolver