"Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony."
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Quote collection
Barbara Kingsolver quotes (page 17 of 23)
451 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature's jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck?... I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist."
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"...trust in Creation which is made fresh daily and doesn’t suffer in translation. This God does not work in especially mysterious ways. The sun here rises and sets at six exactly. A caterpillar becomes a butterfly. A bird raises its brood in the forest and a greenheart tree will only grow from a greenheart seed. He brings drought sometimes followed by torrential rains and if these things aren’t always what I had in mind, they aren’t my punishment either. They’re rewards, let’s say for the patience of a seed."
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"But still, I’d be darned if I was going to be one of those Americans who stomp around Italy barking commands in ever-louder English. I was going to be one of those Americans who traversed Italy with my forehead knit in concentration, divining wordsw from their Latin roots and answering by wedging French cognates into Italian pronunciations spliced onto a standard Spanish verb conjugation."
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"God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves."
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"My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me."
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"Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea."
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"A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it."
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"Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn't."
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"Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break."
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"If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can."
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"Lies are infinite in number, and the truth so small and singular."
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"Do you think its possible to live without wanting to put your name on your paintings? To belong to a group so securely you don't need to rise above it?"
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"God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much."
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"Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not."
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"she's never forgotten, either, how a mystery caught in the hand could lose its grace"
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"You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what's broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it's broken, you are automatically disqualified."
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"We aimed for no more than to have dominion over every creature that moved upon the earth. And so it came to pass that we stepped down there on a place we believed unformed, where only darkness moved on the face of the waters. Now you laugh, day and night, while you gnaw on my bones. But what else could we have thought? Only that it began and ended with us. What do we know, even now? Ask the children. Look at what they grew up to be. We can only speak of the things we carried with us, and the things we took away."
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"Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I was afflicted with Africa like a bout of a rare disease from which I have not managed a full recovery."
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"Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts."
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