Barbara Kingsolver Quotations

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

People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 first sentence of a book is a promise.

The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.

For me, writing time has always been precious, something I wait for and am eager for and make the best use of. That's probably why I get up so early and have writing time in the quiet dawn hours, when no one needs me.

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.

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

Motherhood is so sentimentalised and romanticised in our culture. It's practically against the law to say there are moments in the day when you hate your children. Everyone actually has those moments.

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.

You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm.

Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don't know what I'm looking for. I just do it.

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.

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.

I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.

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

In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career - my anti-job - that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.

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.

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

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.

It's a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.

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

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

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.

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

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

To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct. Baser even than hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty. If the whole world of the living has to turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers.

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

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

I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.

The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go.

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 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.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

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

When I sit down to write, I consider myself an artist.

Most of my books have been about the complex ways an individual depends on community.

After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.

As a biologist, I can't think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.

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

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

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.

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

It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.

Most every book I bring into the world is like birthing a baby; it's a lot of effort!

Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.

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.

My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head.

Southern Appalachians have been ridiculed since the country began. In fiction, they're usually depicted in a cartoonish manner. The region is poor, and very suspicious of outsiders, so there's a sort of 'us versus them' situation. They're easy to poke fun at.

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.

When people are frightened about going hungry and paying their mortgages, a scarcity model begins to prevail; they fear someone else will get their piece of the pie.

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

I don't bring expectations to any of my books. I don't tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.

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

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.

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.

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.

Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave. I never get over being thankful for that - for the courage of my readers.

I was trained in classical piano, but it kind of dawned on me that classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest of us get to play 'Blue Moon' in a hotel lobby.

Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

Patriotism threatens free speech with death. It is infuriated by thoughtful hesitation, constructive criticism of our leaders and pleas for peace. It despises people of foreign birth. It has specifically blamed homosexuals, feminists and the American Civil Liberties Union. In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder. Whom are we calling terrorists here?

Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down." - Mrs. Brown

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don't know.

A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, so people imagine a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had. But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know.

Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!

...nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.

It's terrible to lose somebody, but it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse.

A flower is a plant's way of making love.

Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job...And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. 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.

Maybe life doesn't get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we're willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

There are some who'd hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think's been too lucky.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?

Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.

That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don’t know how a person could ever describe that scent.

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.

Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.

My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.

Human manners are wildly inconsistent; plenty of people have said so. But this one takes the cake: the manner in which we're allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point that out. The conspicious consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spirtual error, or even bad manners.

Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.

Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It's more like conversation, raising new questions and moving you to answer them for yourself.

This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he is not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.

The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.

You don't think you'll live past it and you don't really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that's still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.

I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.

It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

God is frightful, God is great--you pick. I choose this: God is in the details, the completely unnecessary miracles sometimes tossed up as stars to guide us. They are the promise of good fortune in a cloudless day, and the animals in the clouds; look hard enough, and you'll see them. Don't ask if they're real.

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant (among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can't keep, all passion is really a setup, and we're doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and would further add: Who cares? Every spring I go out there anyway, around the bend, unconditionally. ... Come the end of the dark days, I am more than joyful. I'm nuts.