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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
Literature
Free
Feel
Feels
Believe
Mandate
Mandates
Surrounded
Strongly

More quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

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You don't think you'll live past it and you don't really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that's still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Everything truly important is washable.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Morning always comes.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually bring down the charming, infuriating naïveté of Americans that allows us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret ugliness that bring us whatever we want.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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
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I don't bring expectations to any of my books. I don't tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.
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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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what's not in it.
Barbara Kingsolver
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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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.
Barbara Kingsolver
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There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.
Barbara Kingsolver
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How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.
Barbara Kingsolver
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my own relationships with the animals in my life are absurdly complex: Some I love, some I eat, and the scraps left over from the ones I eat, I feed to the ones I love.
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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Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.
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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Nine-tenths of human law is about possession.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.
Barbara Kingsolver