Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.
Quotes to Explore
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It is important to be well read, at least a little bit.
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Retiring for good wasn't difficult. I knew at the time it was right. I was no longer capable of achieving the standards I'd set myself and there was no light at the end of the tunnel.
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My dad's one of the funniest men in the world. I grew up with him making me laugh so much I'd beg him to stop.
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I knew that for this movie to work it had to be very hot and very real, and it wasn't going to be a case of doing it Hollywood all covered with a nice little sheet.
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All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.
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I was with the Jessie Bonstelle Stock Company in Detroit and Buffalo for three seasons - 10 performances and a new play every week. She was an amazing woman who did a great deal for me.
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People are funny, and in the most tragic situations, when comedy erupts from nowhere, it can turn on its head within the space of a second or a minute. You're laughing one minute and you're crying the next and that's just life for me, and that is what people are like.
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How accurately can the law fix the crime? There has to be a mechanism for very fast action. The law is like this: catch them and punish them.
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We've heard that the hookup culture is destroying us. We've heard that it's saving us. We've heard that it's racist. We've agonized over which one of these is true.
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The men and women of my generation are heirs to that great collective success which has been admired worldwide and of which we are so proud. It is now up to us to pass it on to the coming generations.
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We started with things like locating ski runs or locating a transmission line corridor or locating a new town or doing a coastal zone plan. We ourselves weren't doing the planning work, but we were doing all the mapping work for the landscape architects and planners who would subsequently incorporate the maps into their actual designs.
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Beijing was such a different city. There were so few cars, I could walk in the middle of the road. In the summer, the streetlamps attracted swirling bugs. I loved those bugs: crickets, praying mantis, all kinds of beetles. I also have a vivid memory of dazzling sunlight coming out of the sky.
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Our regulatory bodies strive to create honest dealings, fair trades, and a situation in which no one has an advantage over anyone else. But human beings aren't honest. And all trades are made because one person thinks he's getting the better of the other, and the other person thinks the same.
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In a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted.
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In my job I meet many outstanding, world class, British based companies. But we need more companies and more jobs in the companies we have.
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If everybody in this town connected with politics had to leave town because of chasing women and drinking, you would have no government.
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All kids are selfish. I wanted to do homework and do my thing and call my agent. My mother's needs weren't in my mind at that moment.
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I was a pretty good fighter. But it was the writers who made me great.
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I was always interested in film, but I never knew how to go about becoming a filmmaker.
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I like Sergio Ramos, who plays Real Madrid.
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There may be as much nobility in being last as in being first, because the two positions are equally necessary in the world, the one to complement the other.
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Our ideas of happiness, gratification, contentment, satisfaction, all demand that those feelings come from within us. If you flip that on its head and say "What if I took the world at face value?" and then ask "What can I do with what is given?" it's an interesting trick to turn around the whole problem of how you feel.
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I'm a showgirl. After 20 years in show business, I've learned to roll with the punches.
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Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.
