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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

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

Novelist Rare Person Writing
… Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, ‘so far from everything?’ When I hear this question over the phone, I’m usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Garden Running Thinking
Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Dirt might Today
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Heart Moving Pain
It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

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

Animal Skills Vegetables
There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Perfect Time Writing
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Civilization Kids Two
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

New People Something Writing
I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Inspirational Learning Trying
She kept swimming out into life because she hadn’t yet found a rock to stand on.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Found Rocks Swimming
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Creativity People Writing
Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It’s peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

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

Education Order School
All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Politician Promise War
This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Believe Country States Thinking United

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

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes