Quotes By Barbara Kingsolver

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.

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.

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