"For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise."
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Quote collection
Barbara Kingsolver quotes (page 14 of 23)
451 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We must surely appear to the world as exactly what we are: a nation that organizes its economy around consuming twice as much oil as it produces, and around the profligate wastefulness of the wars and campaigns required to defend such consumption. In recent years we have defined our national interest largely in terms of the oil fields and pipelines we need to procure fuel."
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"Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true."
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"What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I’m not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall."
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"The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words."
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"People ask without wanting to know."
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"Everything truly important is washable."
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"The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill."
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"I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political."
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"Most of the girls my age, or even younger, have babies. They appear way too young to be married, till you look in their eyes. Then you'll see it. Their eyes look happy and sad at the same time, but unexcited by anything, shifting easily off to the side as if they've already seen most of what there is. Married eyes."
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"The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business...I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves."
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"I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary."
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"I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers."
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"You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own."
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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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"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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"She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn't."
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"I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer."
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"As a biologist, I can't think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant."
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"Back then I was still appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting fo the dollies."
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