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I believe that the people who survive a cataclysm, rather than those who stand by and analyze it, are nearly always the more credible witnesses to their own history.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Witness
Survive
Stand
Rather
Cataclysm
History
Witnesses
Believe
Analyze
Always
Credible
People
Nearly

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I have my own sheep and I literally sheer the sheep and knot sweaters for friends and family from scratch.
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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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We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
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I struggle with confidence, every time. I’m never completely sure I can write another book. Maybe my scope is too grand, my questions too hard, surely readers won’t want to follow me here. A novel is like a cathedral, it knocks you down to size when you enter into it.
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Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.
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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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You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don't attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.
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One of the very first things I figured out about life...is that it's better to be a hopeful person than a cynical, grumpy one, because you have to live in the same world either way, and if you're hopeful, you have more fun.
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It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.
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I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.
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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.
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Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.
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When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven
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You know reviewers, they are the wind in their own sails.
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Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It's peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.
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Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.
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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.
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It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.
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I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.
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The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.
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