Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERNothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
BARBARA KINGSOLVEREvery 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 KINGSOLVERA good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERThe most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERSome of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don’t; but we wear it all the same
BARBARA KINGSOLVER… 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 KINGSOLVERHigh fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERThe 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 KINGSOLVERThis is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he is not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERI don’t understand how any good art could fail to be political.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERI didn’t study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERI don’t bring expectations to any of my books. I don’t tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERThis is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERThe 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 KINGSOLVERThere is no perfect time to write. There is only now.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERI never think that anything I’m writing is bluntly political in any way. I’m not going for commentary.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER