Quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver

American novelist, essayist and poet

Lived from: 1955 -

Category: Writers (Contemporary) | Poets (Contemporary) Country: FlagUnited States

Born: 8 april 1955

  • At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave. I never get over being thankful for that - for the courage of my readers.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
  • 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.
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  • At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted.
    ― Barbara Kingsolver
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  • A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.
    The Poisonwood Bible
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  • After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.
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  • At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.
    Animal Dreams
    ― Barbara Kingsolver
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  • 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
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  • 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 to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.
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  • Codi: So you think we all just have animal dreams. We can't think of anything to dream except our ordinary lives. Loyd: Only if you have an ordinary life. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.
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  • Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view.
    ― Barbara Kingsolver
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  • 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.
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  • 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 don't know what I'm looking for. I just do it.
    ― Barbara Kingsolver
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  • 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
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  • 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.
    Animal Dreams
    ― Barbara Kingsolver
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  • Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
    ― Barbara Kingsolver
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  • For me, writing time has always been precious, something I wait for and am eager for and make the best use of. That's probably why I get up so early and have writing time in the quiet dawn hours, when no one needs me.
    ― Barbara Kingsolver
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  • Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
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  • Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.
    Prodigal Summer
    ― Barbara Kingsolver
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  • I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.
    ― Barbara Kingsolver
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  • 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 they saved.
    High Tide in Tucson
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  • 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.
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  • Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.
    The Poisonwood Bible
    ― Barbara Kingsolver
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What are the most famous quotes from Barbara Kingsolver?

The two most famous quotes from Barbara Kingsolver are:

  • "At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted."
  • "A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars."

When did Barbara Kingsolver live?

Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955.