Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.
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I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
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I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.
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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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I've always seen the world through the eyes of a scientist. I love the predictable outcomes that science gives us, the control over the world that that can render.
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You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm.
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Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.
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The first sentence of a book is a promise.
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I was trained in classical piano, but it kind of dawned on me that classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest of us get to play 'Blue Moon' in a hotel lobby.
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I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
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It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.
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I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.
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Motherhood is so sentimentalised and romanticised in our culture. It's practically against the law to say there are moments in the day when you hate your children. Everyone actually has those moments.
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I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
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It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.
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We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
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The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.
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People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.
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It's a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
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Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
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I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political.
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For me, writing time has always been precious, something I wait for and am eager for and make the best use of. That's probably why I get up so early and have writing time in the quiet dawn hours, when no one needs me.
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My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head.
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The truth needs so little rehearsal.