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Nine-tenths of human law is about possession.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Nine
Law
Human
Humans
Tenths
Possession

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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A flower is a plant's way of making love.
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High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.
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There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.
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People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
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Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It's just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.
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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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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 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.
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.
Barbara Kingsolver
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It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.
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He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they're feeling because that's how I read the seed catalogs in January.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Mother could go for one year without food, but not one day without her lip sticks.
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People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.
Barbara Kingsolver
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But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!
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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He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.
Barbara Kingsolver