The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERYou think you’re the foreigner here, and I’m the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I’m a foreigner, too.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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If you’re standing in the manure pile, it’s somebody’s job to mention the stink.
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It’s the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.
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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.
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The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.
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Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.
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This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
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In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career – my anti-job – that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.
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No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.
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For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.
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I prefer to remain anomalous.
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It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
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She kept swimming out into life because she hadn’t yet found a rock to stand on.
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People ask without wanting to know.
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Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.
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Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
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Everything truly important is washable.
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People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
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there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I’m concerned that’s like accusing a dog of having a bark!
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The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.
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There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.
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The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman’s coal buttons.
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I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don’t move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.
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All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.
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Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they are missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven.
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Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.
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Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?
BARBARA KINGSOLVER