Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

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

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Libraries

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

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Truth

  Tags in Pain, Heart

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

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Memory, Truth

• 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.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Society

  Tags in People

• The truth needs so little rehearsal.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Truth

  Tags in Needs

• 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.

  Barbara Kingsolver

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  Tags in Dreams

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

  Barbara Kingsolver

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  Tags in Animals

• 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.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Ability

• 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.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Space, Blindness

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

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Home, Growing

• 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.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Empathy

• 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.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Destination

• There’s a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn’t a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in War, France

• 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.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Mother

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

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fiction, Empathy

• Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fiction, Empathy

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

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Creation

  Tags in Literature

• 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.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in World, Eyes

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

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Safe

• 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.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in History

Barbara Kingsolver (60)

Birth:	8th April, 1955
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist

About

Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the former Republic of Congo in her early childhood. Kingsolver earned degrees in biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a non-fiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. Kingsolver has received numerous awards, including the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award 2011, UK's Orange Prize for Fiction 2010, for The Lacuna and the National Humanities Medal. She has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2000, Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize to support literature of social change.

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