Quote

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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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Verbs
Root
Prose
Roots
Dead
Happen
Happens
Make
Bludgeon

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
Barbara Kingsolver
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There's always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.
Barbara Kingsolver
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you can't really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece
Barbara Kingsolver
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I don't look like who I am.
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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Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.
Barbara Kingsolver
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If you're standing in the manure pile, it's somebody's job to mention the stink.
Barbara Kingsolver
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a meaningless phrase repeated again and again begins to resemble truth.
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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It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The past is all we know of the future.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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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Science doesn't tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.
Barbara Kingsolver
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A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.
Barbara Kingsolver