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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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Barbara Kingsolver
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: April 8
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Annapolis
Maryland
People
Wisdom
Authors
Books
Quit
Hope
Quitting
Write
Smoking
Book
Tend
Writing
Older
Long
Takes
Time
Growing

More quotes by 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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Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Root out all the to be verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No It was or they are or I am. Don't let it be, make it happen.
Barbara Kingsolver
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We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
Barbara Kingsolver
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One of the very first things I figured out about life...is that it's better to be a hopeful person than a cynical, grumpy one, because you have to live in the same world either way, and if you're hopeful, you have more fun.
Barbara Kingsolver
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My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.
Barbara Kingsolver
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He needs to go rub his soul against life.
Barbara Kingsolver
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School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
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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Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.
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 don't look like who I am.
Barbara Kingsolver
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...our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Ah, the mysterious croak. Here today, gone tomorrow. It's the best reason I can think of to throw open the blinds and risk belief. Right now, this minute, time to move out into the grief and glory. High tide.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.
Barbara Kingsolver
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Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you're contagious.
Barbara Kingsolver
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People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
Barbara Kingsolver
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It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.
Barbara Kingsolver
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I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other.
Barbara Kingsolver