Barbara Kingsolver quotes

Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist, and poet, widely acclaimed for her works exploring social justice, the environment, and family. Her books, such as "The Poisonwood Bible" and "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," have received numerous awards and global recognition. She is celebrated for her insightful storytelling and strong advocacy for environmental and humanitarian causes. Here are 159 of her quotes:

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

Barbara Kingsolver

Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.

Barbara Kingsolver

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

Barbara Kingsolver

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

Barbara Kingsolver

The 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 Kingsolver

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

Barbara Kingsolver

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

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

Barbara Kingsolver

At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.

Barbara Kingsolver

Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.

Barbara Kingsolver

A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.

Barbara Kingsolver

The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.

Barbara Kingsolver

Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.

Barbara Kingsolver

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

Barbara Kingsolver

Every 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 Kingsolver

I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.

Barbara Kingsolver

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

Barbara Kingsolver

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.

Barbara Kingsolver

Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.

Barbara Kingsolver

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

Barbara Kingsolver

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

Barbara Kingsolver

The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.

Barbara Kingsolver