Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

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

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Obession, Suppose

• 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.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Religion

• 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.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Experience

• 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.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Novel, Side

• 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.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fiction

• 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!

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Possibility

• 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

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

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Life

• 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

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

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Safe

• 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

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

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Pretending

• 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

• 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.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Time

• 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

• 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

• 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

• It’s surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Topics in Memory

  Tags in Surprising

• The most important thing about a person is what you don’t know.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Tags in Know, Important

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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