Quotes By Barbara Kingsolver
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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!
Barbara Kingsolver
I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.
Barbara Kingsolver
Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.
Barbara Kingsolver
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted.
Barbara Kingsolver
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
Barbara Kingsolver
Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.
Barbara Kingsolver
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive.
Barbara Kingsolver
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.
Barbara Kingsolver