"Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom."
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Quote collection
Barbara Kingsolver quotes (page 16 of 23)
451 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one, "My life; what I stole from history, and how I live with it."
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"How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets."
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"I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them."
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"After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth."
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"Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life."
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"Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands."
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"For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest."
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"He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life."
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"Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind."
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"Mother could go for one year without food, but not one day without her lip sticks."
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"Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations."
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"The past is all we know of the future."
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"Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity *after* their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it's the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand."
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"In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves."
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"But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom."
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"But we've all ended up giving body and soul to Africa, one way or another. Even Adah, who's becoming an expert in tropical epidemiology and strange new viruses. Each of us got our heart buried in six feet of African dirt; we are all co-conspirators here. I mean, all of us, not just my family. So what do you do now? You get to find your own way to dig out a heart and shake it off and hold it up to the light again."
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"The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing."
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"What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us."
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"Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them."
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