Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

Last time I talked to her she didn’t sound like herself. She’s depressed. It’s awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they’re no good.

Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.

Everything truly important is washable.

I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.

Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.

I don’t bring expectations to any of my books. I don’t tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.

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

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.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.

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