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.”

“In Bobby Ogle's version of heaven everyone would wind up in one place, criminals and Muslims included.”

“Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.”

“It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life... Maybe being perfectly happy is not really the point. Maybe that is only some modern American dream of the point, while the truer measure of humanity is the distance we must travel in our lives, time and again, "twixt two extremes of passion--joy and grief," as Shakespeare put it. However much I've lost, what remains to me is that I can still speak to name the things I love. And I can look for safety in giving myself away to the world's least losable things.”

“She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.”

“Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.”

“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.”

“When people are frightened about going hungry and paying their mortgages, a scarcity model begins to prevail; they fear someone else will get their piece of the pie.”

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

“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.”

“The very least you can do in your life is 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.”

“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.”

“The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.”

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

“The truth needs so little rehearsal.”

“People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.”

“The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earring on sad, rich widows”

“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.”

“...The question is, why do you think you can't be a writer?""To be a writer, you need readers.""I'm no painter, then. Who ever looks at my little dumb pieces of shit?”

“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.”