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"A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. and, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. this forest eats itself and lives forever."
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"A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time."

"Why we don't feel sorry for killing thousands of mosquitoes every day? Are they useless or too many? We humans must realize it before it is too late."

"Inside the building, the sun lights up segments of the rotting wooden floor through the many holes in the roof. As I look for her, I register things: the soggy floorboards. The smell of almonds, like her. An old claw-footed bathtub in a corner. So many holes everywhere that this place is simultaneously inside and outside."

"The mother-earth may not like the way we preserve her...if any."

"The sun had bled away every smell and left nothing."

"Clean communities, crystal clear coastal waters."

"I reflect back 35 years ago, and look how far we have come in America with our environmental policy to improve the conditions of our air and water, and we have had some real successes."

"Another glorious feature of many modern science museums is a movie theater showing IMAX or OMNIMAX films. In some cases the screen is ten stories tall and wraps around you. The Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museu, the popular museum on Earth, has premiered in its Langley Theater some of the best of these films. 'To Fly' brings a catch to my throat even after five or six viewings. I've seen religious leaders of many denominations witness 'Blue Planet' and be converted on the spot to the need to protect the Earth's environment."

"Denial of climate change and degradation of environment for the purpose of economic prosperity is humiliation and slavery of the nature."

"I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on my first book... and I began putting more work into environmental history."
Explore more quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

"As a dinner guest I gratefully eat just about anything that's set before me, because graciousness among friends is dearer to me than any other agenda."

"That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that's how they do it here. Maybe he's been in Africa so long he's forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it's called Monotony."

"They said it was to be a revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants' rooms because they didn't believe in laundry maids or cooks.Nobody does, really. Why should they? Only in having clean clothes, clean floors, and enchiladas tapatias."

"To stomp about the world ignoring cultural differences is arrogant, to be sure, but perhaps there is another kind of arrogance in the presumption that we may ever really build a faultless bridge from one shore to another, or even know where the mist has ceded to landfall."

"The urge to lie is produced by the contradictions in our lives. We are made to declare love for our country, while it tramples our rights and dignity."

"But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation's hopes will die with it, and no cumulative progress is possible for the human will."

"A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever."

"Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave. I never get over being thankful for that - for the courage of my readers."
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