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I 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 Kingsolver

Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Knives Memories Novelist
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Love Making Photography
I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Farmers Farms Virginia
Sadness is more or less like a head cold – with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Cancer Depression Sadness
Everything truly important is washable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Housework Important
I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Best Work Offer Thinking
He needs to go rub his soul against life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Life Need Rub Soul
Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Miracle Vegetables
This 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 KINGSOLVER

Dark Mouth Scent
I’m not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I’m doing.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Knows Pretending
…our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Moving Slides Tasks
… 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
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.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Land Stupid Thinking
As a biologist, I can’t think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Animal Plant Thinking
A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Doe Dog Thinking
From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Fallen Tree Trouble

I 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.

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I 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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes