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"The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earring on sad, rich widows."
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"So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea."

"I've just simply used what I've used because of the great, great expressive potential of it."

"It must have been an endless breathing in: between the wish to know and the wish to praise there was no seam."

"It's too short,' she said, 'ever so much too short.' Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad."

"Life is a luminous halo a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning."

"Air of dustFor a moment I was a storm cloud,All righteous booming thunder;All sharp and pinning,Dazzling.Once the flashing fadedA sizzling prong sprang upwards.I was positively popped.The static situationStruck meNegatively, And I leaked out sulfur on the peopleWho dared hold up the sky.Strong storms are still bonelessAnd mostly all alone."

"The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earring on sad, rich widows."
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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