Quotes By Barbara Kingsolver

I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.

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.

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.