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

Barbara Kingsolver

Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Notebook Silence Writing
I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

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

Kitchen Memories Men
Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Doors Insomnia Light
You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don’t attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Group Needs World
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?
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Pet Python Television
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Job Mother Running
Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Prayer Transactions
Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Childhood Transition Unnoticed
A sound-bite culture can’t discuss science very well. Exactly what we’re losing when we reduce biodiversity, the causes and consequences of global warming-these traumas can’t be adequately summarized in an evening news wrap-up.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Causes Evening Sound
Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man’s skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people’s back yards.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Father Heart Men
She kept swimming out into life because she hadn’t yet found a rock to stand on.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Found Rocks Swimming
The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Air Both Grief Real Thing
The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman’s coal buttons.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Black Eye Geometric Running Shape White
You don’t think you’ll live past it and you don’t really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that’s still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Grief Past Thinking
I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Decided Dresses Memorable

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

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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