Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

357 quotes in 4555 categories

• Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.
• Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.
• 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.
• The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.
• 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…
• 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.…
• 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…
• 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…
• I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are…
• I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they…
• 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…
• 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…
• In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career - my anti-job…
• 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…
• 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…
• Southern Appalachians have been ridiculed since the country began. In fiction, they're usually depicted in a cartoonish manner. The region is poor, and very suspicious…
• When people are frightened about going hungry and paying their mortgages, a scarcity model begins to prevail; they fear someone else will get their piece…
• You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend,…
• Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.
• Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration…

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