Barbara Kingsolver quotes:

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.

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.

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career - my anti-job - that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.

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.

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.

After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was trained in classical piano, but it kind of dawned on me that classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest of us get to play 'Blue Moon' in a hotel lobby.

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

People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.

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.

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.

It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political.

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

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

The first sentence of a book is a promise.

To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.

God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.

You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It's what these guys have decided to call America. They have the audacity to say, 'There, you sons of bitches, don't lay a finger on it. That is a finished product.'But any country is still in the making. Always. That's just history, people have to see that.

So she was what Hester called a 911 Christian: in the event of an emergency, call the Lord.

That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that's how they do it here. Maybe he's been in Africa so long he's forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it's called Monotony.

Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, confidence swaggering into the storm: Man against Nature. Of all the possible conflicts, that was the one that was hopeless. Even a slim education had taught her this much: Man loses.

There must be transients in the bird world too, rumple-feathered outcasts that naturally seek out each other's company in inferior and dying trees.

Dellarobia noted they were not a perfect physical match: Nelda plump and rosy-cheeked, her mother fine-boned. The resemblance blazed in their wide brown eyes and the way they nodded, the gnomy caps bobbing. Mother-daughter adventurers. She felt a pang of longing, as she often did in church. Everybody had a mother and a God; those were standard issue."

....mountains. They stand at every view, like a mother offering a blanket in which to wrap everyday life and shelter it from useless. dreads. In june they are walls of white rhodendron blossom. In autumn the forests set themselves afflame with color. Even winter has its icy charms."

there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I'm concerned that's like accusing a dog of having a bark!

Like Daniel she enteres the lions' den, but lacking Daniel's pure and unblemished soul, Ada is spiced with the flavors of vice that make for a tasty meal. Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.

Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes

Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It's just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.

I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.

Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.

When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.

Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn't.

the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners

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

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

Something in me was always watching life from the outside, permanently obsessed with the notion of belonging vs. not-belonging [to a group]. It did not make for a happy childhood, but it was excellent training for a writer.

We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.

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.

Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair.

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.

I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

He had senile dementia and liked to go outside naked, but he could still do two things perfectly: win at checkers and write out prescriptions.

A flower is your cousin...Sometimes a person has got to take a life, like a chicken's or a hog's when you need it...But nobody is so hungry they need to kill a flower. Cherokee great-grandmother

I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?

A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.

Patriotism threatens free speech with death. It is infuriated by thoughtful hesitation, constructive criticism of our leaders and pleas for peace. It despises people of foreign birth. It has specifically blamed homosexuals, feminists and the American Civil Liberties Union. In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder. Whom are we calling terrorists here?

Height isn't something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.

The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.

Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?

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.

Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one, "My life; what I stole from history, and how I live with it.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.

The standard approach has been to pump up the dosage of chemicals ... Twenty percent of these approved-for-use pesticides are listed by the EPA as carcinogenic in humans.

With all due respect for the wondrous ways people have invented to amuse themselves and one another on paved surfaces, I find that this exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad. I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant's way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.

What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.

He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. "Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.

From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.

There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

Children model the behavior of adults, on whatever scale is available to them. Ours are growing up in a nation whose most important, influential men - from presidents to the coolest film characters - solve problems by killing people. ... We have taught our children in a thousand ways, sometimes with flag-waving and sometimes with a laugh track, that the bad guy deserves to die.

I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer's block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don't. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.

It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise

It's a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.

God is frightful, God is great--you pick. I choose this: God is in the details, the completely unnecessary miracles sometimes tossed up as stars to guide us. They are the promise of good fortune in a cloudless day, and the animals in the clouds; look hard enough, and you'll see them. Don't ask if they're real.

Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

Ah, the mysterious croak. Here today, gone tomorrow. It's the best reason I can think of to throw open the blinds and risk belief. Right now, this minute, time to move out into the grief and glory. High tide.

High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

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.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.

There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

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.

There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.

it takes your sleeping self years to catch up to where you really are. ... when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness.

Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.

It is completely usual for me to get up in the morning, take a look around, and laugh out loud.

I believe with all my heart in delivering on my contract with my readers. They've got plenty of other things to do, so I had better give them a reason to turn every one of these 550 pages. This is my promise: I solemnly swear I'll make you laugh out loud at least once, cry a little in private, and burn whatever you left on the stove.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.

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

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.

A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, so people imagine a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had. But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know.

you can't really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece

I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they're feeling because that's how I read the seed catalogs in January.

Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down." - Mrs. Brown

It's very important to distinguish between innocence and naivete. The innocent do not deserve to be the victims of violence. But only the naive refuse to think about the origins of violence and to pursue the possibility that the genesis of that hatred could be addressed.

Respecting the dignity of a spectacular food means enjoying it at its best. Europeans celebrate the short season of abundant asparagus as a form of holiday. In the Netherlands the first cutting coincides with Father's Day, on which restaurants may feature all-asparagus menus and hand out neckties decorated with asparagus spears.

He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

A writer's occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.

We must surely appear to the world as exactly what we are: a nation that organizes its economy around consuming twice as much oil as it produces, and around the profligate wastefulness of the wars and campaigns required to defend such consumption. In recent years we have defined our national interest largely in terms of the oil fields and pipelines we need to procure fuel.

Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they are missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven.

Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.

School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.

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.

From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.

They all attended Hester's church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.

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.

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.

Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I was afflicted with Africa like a bout of a rare disease from which I have not managed a full recovery.

This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'Not at this address'. Just keep looking for the right address.

Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.

There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.