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.

I didn't study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters.

In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We're surrounded by advertising.

If my setting is new to a reader, or the concerns of the novel are new, I hope they will learn something about the world. I would like to say that they can trust that what they do learn in the novel will be accurate, because I pay a lot of attention to facts. I do a lot of research to make sure that I'm not giving them, you know, blue moons of Jupiter. It's not science fiction.

I think that when people read fiction, they're really reading for wisdom. I am. That's what most of us really love. If we read a novel that rocks our world, it's because there's something in it that we didn't know already. Not just information but really wisdom - sort of what to do with our information. And wisdom comes from experience.

The longer you live, the more likely you are to have something to say.

Quit smoking in the hope of growing old. It takes a long time to write. People go to books for wisdom and older authors tend to have more of it.

I have my own sheep and I literally sheer the sheep and knot sweaters for friends and family from scratch.

Root out all the "to be" verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No "It was" or "they are" or "I am." Don't let it be, make it happen.

I write every moment that is humanly possible. I write every day and every night. The only discipline I lack is the discipline is to quit.

I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.

I believe with all my heart in delivering on my contract with my readers. They've got plenty of other things to do, so I had better give them a reason to turn every one of these 550 pages. This is my promise: I solemnly swear I'll make you laugh out loud at least once, cry a little in private, and burn whatever you left on the stove.

Something in me was always watching life from the outside, permanently obsessed with the notion of belonging vs. not-belonging [to a group]. It did not make for a happy childhood, but it was excellent training for a writer.

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.

Plot comes first. The plot is the archictecture of your novel. You wouldn't build a house without a plan. If I wrote without a plot, it would just be a pile of bricks. Characters are your servants. They must serve your plot.

Pay attention to your passions. They are the key to starting and finishing the book you are meant to write. I don't believe in talent. I believe in passion.

Before that I was a scientist. I did research in population biology. And that's what I always go back to, it helps me to remember that people are not the end of the world, although we may be when it comes to it. We're just one species among millions in this world.

It's very important to distinguish between innocence and naivete. The innocent do not deserve to be the victims of violence. But only the naive refuse to think about the origins of violence and to pursue the possibility that the genesis of that hatred could be addressed.

There is something in us that loves certain disasters and the fever of this moment and surrendering to that.

Mexico admits you through an arched stone orifice into the tree-filled courtyard of its heart, where a dog pisses against a wall and a waiter hustles through a curtain of jasmine to bring a bowl of tortilla soup, steaming with cilantro and lime. Cats stalk lizards among the clay pots around the fountain, doves settle into the flowering vines and coo their prayers, thankful for the existence of lizards. The potted plants silently exhale, outgrowing their clay pots. Like Mexico's children they stand pinched and patient in last year's too-small shoes.

You know reviewers, they are the wind in their own sails.

Lies are infinite in number, and the truth so small and singular.

This Forest eats itself and lives forever.

Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes

Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity *after* their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it's the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand.

If the Lord hasn't got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that's his business.

Hallie and I... were all there was. The image in the mirror that proves you are still here. We had exactly one sister apiece. We grew up knowing the simple arithmetic of scarcity: A sister is more precious than an eye.

Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.

you can't really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece

He needs to go rub his soul against life.

I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

Mother could go for one year without food, but not one day without her lip sticks.

Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.

The past is all we know of the future.