Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

Most every book I bring into the world is like birthing a baby; it's a lot of effort!

I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.

You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm.

For me, writing time has always been precious, something I wait for and am eager for and make the best use of. That's probably why I get up so early and have writing time in the quiet dawn hours, when no one needs me.

My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.

I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

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

Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he's entitled to joy rather than submission?

A woman without a man -- a condition of 'manlessness' -- is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife.

Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom.

War so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.

Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view.

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.

Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.

The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.

Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.

When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us everyday.

My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.

I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political.

A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.