"I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable."
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Quote collection
Barbara Kingsolver quotes (page 12 of 23)
451 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"the novel is inherently a political instrument, regardless of its subject. It invites you - more than invites you, induces you - to live inside another person's skin. It creates empathy. And that's the antidote to bigotry. The novel doesn't just tell you about another life, which is what a newspaper would do. It makes you live another life, inhabit another perspective. And that's very important."
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"Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction."
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"There's always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline."
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"Now, see, that's why you want Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy...the trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn't agree with you, all that's left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho."
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"They all attended Hester's church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers."
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"You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next."
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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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"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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"Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica."
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"Height isn't something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed."
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"Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost."
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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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"School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind."
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"I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me."
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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."
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"Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please."
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"I think that when people read fiction, they're really reading for wisdom. I am. That's what most of us really love. If we read a novel that rocks our world, it's because there's something in it that we didn't know already. Not just information but really wisdom - sort of what to do with our information. And wisdom comes from experience."
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"Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man's skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people's back yards."
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"I didn't study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters."
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