Top 45 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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

The first sentence of a book is a promise.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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