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A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Terror
Lifetime
Spend
Didn
Persons
Person
Things
Retrospective
Thinking
Nearly

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.
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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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For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.
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I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.
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Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility
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This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
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Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.
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My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head.
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Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.
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Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.
Barbara Kingsolver
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How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.
Barbara Kingsolver
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the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners
Barbara Kingsolver
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No matter what kind of night you're having, morning always wins.
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.
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Mother could go for one year without food, but not one day without her lip sticks.
Barbara Kingsolver