Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business...I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage.

There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

Morning always comes.

Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.

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'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.

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.

But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

she's never forgotten, either, how a mystery caught in the hand could lose its grace

Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.

Do you think its possible to live without wanting to put your name on your paintings? To belong to a group so securely you don't need to rise above it?

No matter what kind of night you're having, morning always wins.

You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.

War so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.

Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.

The past is all we know of the future.

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.

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

If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

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.

For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.

Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn't.

A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.

Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea.

Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.

He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your 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.

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

No reporter worth his buttons will let the facts intrude on a good story.

I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them.

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

Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.

Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.

It is completely usual for me to get up in the morning, take a look around, and laugh out loud.

No kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred.

We tap our toes to chaste love songs about the silvery moon without recognizing them as hymns to copulation.

I've never gotten over high school, to the extent that I'm still a little surprised that my friends want to hang out with me.

I don't *ever* write about real people. Art is supposed to be better than that. If you want a slice of life, look out the window.