Small change, small wonders – these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life. – Barbara Kingsolver
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
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life. – Barbara Kingsolver
The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing. – 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
At home, growing up, we weren’t really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn’t have what we wanted. – 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
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
My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it’s because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head. – 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
We’re animals. We’re born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts. – Barbara Kingsolver
To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct – crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is! – 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
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
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier. – 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
After ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth. – Barbara Kingsolver
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. – 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