Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

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.

the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners

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

Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.

I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.

The first sentence of a book is a promise.

Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.

People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.

Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for!

To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!

A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.

High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

There are days when I am envious of my hens: when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.

People ask without wanting to know.

People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.

She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history... Listen being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.

It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

He needs to go rub his soul against life.

A flower is your cousin...Sometimes a person has got to take a life, like a chicken's or a hog's when you need it...But nobody is so hungry they need to kill a flower. Cherokee great-grandmother

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