Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

357 quotes in 4555 categories

• I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.
• Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get…
• The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
• Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn't it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring…
• We must surely appear to the world as exactly what we are: a nation that organizes its economy around consuming twice as much oil as…
• The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing…
• The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go.
• What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the…
• Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
• 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…
• Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
• 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…
• 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.
• Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds…
• 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…
• Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
• 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…
• To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into…
• Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
• 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…

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