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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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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Jobs
Manure
Stink
Pile
Mention
Standing
Somebody

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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There are some who'd hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think's been too lucky.
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A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.
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Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.
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Like Daniel she enteres the lions' den, but lacking Daniel's pure and unblemished soul, Ada is spiced with the flavors of vice that make for a tasty meal. Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.
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Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.
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If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
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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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Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.
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Nine-tenths of human law is about possession.
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It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
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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.
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They all attended Hester's church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.
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Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you figure out what you have to say.
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Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.
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If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.
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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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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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There's always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.
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.
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You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm.
Barbara Kingsolver