"I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room."
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Quote collection
Barbara Kingsolver quotes (page 9 of 23)
451 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes."
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"Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember."
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"You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don't attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world."
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"Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it."
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"He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible."
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"...prodigal summer, the season of extravagant procreation. It could wear out everything in its path with its passionate excesses, but nothing alive with wings or a heart or a seed curled into itself in the ground could resist welcoming it back when it came."
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"There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief."
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"Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly."
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"Gilbert has established herself as a straight-up storyteller who dares us into adventures of worldly discovery, and this novel stands as a winning next act. “The Signature of All Things” is a bracing homage to the many natures of genius and the inevitable progress of ideas, in a world that reveals its best truths to the uncommonly patient minds."
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"Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed."
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"I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts."
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"I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect."
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"I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer's block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don't. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done."
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"If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread."
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"I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing."
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"Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up."
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"A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name."
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"Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write."
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"Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet."
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