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In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We're surrounded by advertising.

Barbara Kingsolver

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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Thinking
Tell
Surrounded
Doesn
Literary
Writing
Advertising
Kind
Kinds
Really
Wear
Things
Fiction
Love
Fact
Think
Facts

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Do you think its possible to live without wanting to put your name on your paintings? To belong to a group so securely you don't need to rise above it?
Barbara Kingsolver
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Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Mother could go for one year without food, but not one day without her lip sticks.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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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Quit smoking in the hope of growing old. It takes a long time to write. People go to books for wisdom and older authors tend to have more of it.
Barbara Kingsolver
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God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.
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
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Nine-tenths of human law is about possession.
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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When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.
Barbara Kingsolver
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This Forest eats itself and lives forever.
Barbara Kingsolver