Quote

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.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Kill
Real
Things
Rope
Like
Imaginary
Substance
Absence
Grief
Air

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.
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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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Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.
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The happiest people are the ones with the most community.
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Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need
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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.
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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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The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.
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Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
Barbara Kingsolver
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my own relationships with the animals in my life are absurdly complex: Some I love, some I eat, and the scraps left over from the ones I eat, I feed to the ones I love.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.
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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From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.
Barbara Kingsolver