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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

Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Kings Mind Poison
In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Long Passion Running
I’m widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I’m not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

New People Something Writing
I never think that anything I’m writing is bluntly political in any way. I’m not going for commentary.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Political Thinking Writing
There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Believe Grief Track
The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Change May Salvation
This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Believe Country States Thinking United
Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Civilization Kids Two
There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Perfect Time Writing
Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Miracle Vegetables
Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Believe Deserve Luck
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Careers Jobs Stress
Many of us who aren’t farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Past Real Secret
People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Book Life People Uncertainty
I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Grew Grew Up People
To people who think of themselves as God’s houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Land Stupid Thinking

We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.

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Popular Authors

We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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