Close the door. Write with _no one_ looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.
– Barbara Kingsolver
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
– Barbara Kingsolver
It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.
– Barbara Kingsolver
It wasn't a matter of courage or dreams, but something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I'd spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.
– Barbara Kingsolver
It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
– Barbara Kingsolver
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.
– Barbara Kingsolver
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
– Barbara Kingsolver
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
– Barbara Kingsolver
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
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
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
The truth needs so little rehearsal.
– Barbara Kingsolver
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.
– Barbara Kingsolver
We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
– Barbara Kingsolver
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
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
Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.
– Barbara Kingsolver
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
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.
– Barbara Kingsolver
Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
– Barbara Kingsolver
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
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
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
I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.
– Barbara Kingsolver
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.
– Barbara Kingsolver
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
At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted.