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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
Feels
Believe
Mandate
Mandates
Surrounded
Strongly
Literature
Free
Feel

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.
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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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Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It's peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.
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Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
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The longer you live, the more likely you are to have something to say.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Memories do not always soften with time some grow edges like knives.
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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Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Southern Appalachians have been ridiculed since the country began. In fiction, they're usually depicted in a cartoonish manner. The region is poor, and very suspicious of outsiders, so there's a sort of 'us versus them' situation. They're easy to poke fun at.
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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Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their skulls and onto paper.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
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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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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The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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