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We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
Mandates
Surrounded
Strongly
Literature
Free
Feel
Feels
Believe
Mandate
More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver
The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.
Barbara Kingsolver
Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
Barbara Kingsolver
Hallie and I... were all there was. The image in the mirror that proves you are still here. We had exactly one sister apiece. We grew up knowing the simple arithmetic of scarcity: A sister is more precious than an eye.
Barbara Kingsolver
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
How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
Barbara Kingsolver
To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!
Barbara Kingsolver
I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.
Barbara Kingsolver
God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.
Barbara Kingsolver
I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.
Barbara Kingsolver
You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own.
Barbara Kingsolver
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
I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it intently political. I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.
Barbara Kingsolver
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
Nine-tenths of human law is about possession.
Barbara Kingsolver
Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used.
Barbara Kingsolver
It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
Barbara Kingsolver
Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man's skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people's back yards.
Barbara Kingsolver
As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop.
Barbara Kingsolver
People ask without wanting to know.
Barbara Kingsolver
But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.
Barbara Kingsolver
