Quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

About Barbara Kingsolver:

Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood. Kingsolver earned degrees in biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a non-fiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

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 voice in your head to be still.

Barbara Kingsolver

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

Barbara Kingsolver

It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.

Barbara Kingsolver

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

Barbara Kingsolver

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.

Barbara Kingsolver

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Barbara Kingsolver

Motherhood is so sentimentalised and romanticised in our culture. It's practically against the law to say there are moments in the day when you hate your children. Everyone actually has those moments.

Barbara Kingsolver

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

Barbara Kingsolver

I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.

Barbara Kingsolver

The first sentence of a book is a promise.

Barbara Kingsolver

I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.

Barbara Kingsolver

When I sit down to write, I consider myself an artist.

Barbara Kingsolver

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.

Barbara Kingsolver

I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.

Barbara Kingsolver

Most every book I bring into the world is like birthing a baby; it's a lot of effort!

Barbara Kingsolver

As a biologist, I can't think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.

Barbara Kingsolver

Most of my books have been about the complex ways an individual depends on community.

Barbara Kingsolver

Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.

Barbara Kingsolver

I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.

Barbara Kingsolver

Author Bio

  • NameBarbara Kingsolver
  • DescriptionAmerican author, poet and essayist
  • BornApril 8, 1955
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionNovelist; Poet
  • WorksThe Poisonwood Bible; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year Of Food Life
  • AwardsNational Humanities Medal