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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
Standing
Somebody
Jobs
Manure
Stink
Pile
Mention

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I’m not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall.
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It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
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Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need
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Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea.
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School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
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Morning always comes.
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Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
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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 choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever.
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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.
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No matter what kind of night you're having, morning always wins.
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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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You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what's broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it's broken, you are automatically disqualified.
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I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.
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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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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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It's terrible to lose somebody, but it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse.
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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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In the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.
Barbara Kingsolver