When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERPoetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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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.
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I know I’m a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
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Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he’s entitled to joy rather than submission?
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The truth needs so little rehearsal.
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Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history… Listen being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.
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Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don’t; but we wear it all the same
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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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We agreed with him in principal – we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.
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When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us everyday.
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Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?
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If you can’t dress expensive, dress memorable.
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Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
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Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
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It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
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Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It’s more like conversation, raising new questions and inspiring you to answer them for yourself.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER