"Last time I talked to her she didn't sound like herself. She's depressed. It's awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they're no good."
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Quote collection
Barbara Kingsolver quotes (page 15 of 23)
451 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Parenting is something that happens mostly while you're thinking of something else."
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"organization is the religion of the single parent."
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"When the scope of the problem seems insuperable, isn't it time to call this one, give it up, and get on with life as we know it. I do know that answer to that one: that's called child abuse. When my teenager worries that her generation won't be able to fix this problem, I have to admit to her that it won't be up to her generation. It's up to mine. This is a now-or-never kind of project."
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"I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day."
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"The talkers are rising above the thinkers."
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"People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own."
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"Downstream is always someone else's up."
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"You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you."
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"I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?"
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"My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit."
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"I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book."
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"A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul."
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"It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell."
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"He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. "Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes."
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"A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill."
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"The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep."
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"restraint equals indulgence"
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"There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet."
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"The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best."
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