"I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience."
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Quote collection
Barbara Kingsolver quotes (page 22 of 23)
451 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise."
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"Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view."
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"Nine-tenths of human law is about possession."
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"Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility"
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"The standard approach has been to pump up the dosage of chemicals ... Twenty percent of these approved-for-use pesticides are listed by the EPA as carcinogenic in humans."
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"A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world's best juices for ourselves-these may also be our enemies. The changes we dread most may contain our salvation."
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"What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything."
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"I have my own sheep and I literally sheer the sheep and knot sweaters for friends and family from scratch."
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"I write every moment that is humanly possible. I write every day and every night. The only discipline I lack is the discipline is to quit."
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"The longer you live, the more likely you are to have something to say."
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"I believe with all my heart in delivering on my contract with my readers. They've got plenty of other things to do, so I had better give them a reason to turn every one of these 550 pages. This is my promise: I solemnly swear I'll make you laugh out loud at least once, cry a little in private, and burn whatever you left on the stove."
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"In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We're surrounded by advertising."
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"It's very important to distinguish between innocence and naivete. The innocent do not deserve to be the victims of violence. But only the naive refuse to think about the origins of violence and to pursue the possibility that the genesis of that hatred could be addressed."
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"Pay attention to your passions. They are the key to starting and finishing the book you are meant to write. I don't believe in talent. I believe in passion."
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"There is something in us that loves certain disasters and the fever of this moment and surrendering to that."
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"If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic."
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"Plot comes first. The plot is the archictecture of your novel. You wouldn't build a house without a plan. If I wrote without a plot, it would just be a pile of bricks. Characters are your servants. They must serve your plot."
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"Before that I was a scientist. I did research in population biology. And that's what I always go back to, it helps me to remember that people are not the end of the world, although we may be when it comes to it. We're just one species among millions in this world."
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"When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration."
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