Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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The truth needs so little rehearsal.
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Most of my books have been about the complex ways an individual depends on community.
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Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.
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Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.
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When people are frightened about going hungry and paying their mortgages, a scarcity model begins to prevail; they fear someone else will get their piece of the pie.
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What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
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I used to think religion was just more of the same thing. Dump responsibility on the big guy. Now I see an importance in that. It's a relief to accept that not everything is under your control.
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When I sit down to write, I consider myself an artist.
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Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.
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When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.
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Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
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I don't bring expectations to any of my books. I don't tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.
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What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
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People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.
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At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.
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There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.
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At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted.
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Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.
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Most every book I bring into the world is like birthing a baby; it's a lot of effort!
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I also thank Bill McKibben and his 350.org colleagues for the most important work in the world, and the most unending.
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Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
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I can count all the ways in which being a mother has enriched my understanding of the world, of character, my sense of the future and my attachment to it. I can't imagine what kind of writer I'd be if I didn't have my kids.
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I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.
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It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.