Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

We agreed with him in principal - we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they're not self-sufficient.

I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.

What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?

my own relationships with the animals in my life are absurdly complex: Some I love, some I eat, and the scraps left over from the ones I eat, I feed to the ones I love.

It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life.

I've always seen the world through the eyes of a scientist. I love the predictable outcomes that science gives us, the control over the world that that can render.

I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.

But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.

I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

We tap our toes to chaste love songs about the silvery moon without recognizing them as hymns to copulation.

Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.

Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.

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

I've never gotten over high school, to the extent that I'm still a little surprised that my friends want to hang out with me.

I don't *ever* write about real people. Art is supposed to be better than that. If you want a slice of life, look out the window.

What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive.

It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

It's a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.

People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

Quit smoking in the hope of growing old. It takes a long time to write. People go to books for wisdom and older authors tend to have more of it.