"Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life."
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Quote collection
Barbara Kingsolver quotes (page 2 of 23)
451 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved."
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"Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt."
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"That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don’t know how a person could ever describe that scent."
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"It's terrible to lose somebody, but it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse."
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"April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant (among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can't keep, all passion is really a setup, and we're doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and would further add: Who cares? Every spring I go out there anyway, around the bend, unconditionally. ... Come the end of the dark days, I am more than joyful. I'm nuts."
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"When I look out the window, I exhale a prayer of thanks for the color green, for my children's safety, for the simple acts of faith like planting a garden that helped see us through another spring, another summer. And I inhale some kind of promise to protect my kids' hopes and good intentions we began with in this country. Freedom of speech, the protection of diversity - these are the most important ingredients of American civil life and my own survival. If I ever took them for granted, I don't know."
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"The truth needs so little rehearsal."
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"It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't."
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"From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood."
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"You don't think you'll live past it and you don't really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that's still alive wakes up one day and takes over again."
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"Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent."
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"The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know."
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"Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?"
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"Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard."
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"Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!"
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"There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good."
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"No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill."
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"What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive."
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"The way I see it, a person isn't nothing more than a scarecrow... The only difference between one that stands up good and one that blows over is what kind of a stick they're stuck up there on."
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