Quotes By Barbara Kingsolver

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.

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.

I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.

It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.

I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.

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.

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.

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.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.

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.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.

I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.

Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.

To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.

At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted.

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.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

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.

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.

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.

The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.