Quotes By Barbara Kingsolver

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

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.

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.

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

I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other. And living on the border between Mexico and the U.S. for so many years gave me a lot of insight into that.

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.

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.