Barbara Kingsolver

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

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

Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.

This forest eats itself and lives forever.

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

The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.

As a dinner guest I gratefully eat just about anything thats set before me because graciousness among friends is dearer to me than any other agenda.

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.

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.

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.

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.

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

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.

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.

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.

A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

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

The very least you can do in your life is 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 cant 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.

A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.

A writers occupational hazard I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.

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.

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.

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

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.

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error or even bad manners.

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.

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.

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

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didnt.

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.

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.

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

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.

A dog can't think that much about what he's doing, he just does what feels right.

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.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.

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.

A meaningless phrase repeated again and again begins to resemble 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.

A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.

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.

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

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. Its the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone elses pain is as meaningful as your own.

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.

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

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.

Its frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

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

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.

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.

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

Forgive me O Heavenly Father according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a mans skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several peoples back yards.

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

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

A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps sucking life out of death. I am the forests conscience but remember the forest eats itself and lives forever.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Let's all sing the redneck national anthem: Settle for what you can get.

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

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.

The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Corn syrup and added fats have been outed as major ingredients in fast food but they hide out in packaged foods too even presumed innocent ones like crackers.

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.

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.

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

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.

Its surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

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

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!

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

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.

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.