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
It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t. – Barbara Kingsolver
I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves. – Barbara Kingsolver
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 turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else. – 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
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
Most every book I bring into the world is like birthing a baby; it’s a lot of effort! – 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
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
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
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
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
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. – Barbara Kingsolver
I never think that anything I’m writing is bluntly political in any way. I’m not going for commentary. – Barbara Kingsolver
I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction – they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying. – Barbara Kingsolver
Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people. – Barbara Kingsolver
When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration. – 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
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
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
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
