Quotes By Barbara Kingsolver

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 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.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.