Quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver

American novelist, essayist and poet

Alive from: 1955-

Category: Poets (Contemporary)

Quotes 1 till 15 of 55.

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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.

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  A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.
  Source: 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.
  Source: Animal Dreams

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
  Source: Animal Dreams

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  Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

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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.

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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.