Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.
Barbara Kingsolveryou can't really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece
Barbara KingsolverIf we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
Barbara KingsolverI think that when people read fiction, they're really reading for wisdom. I am. That's what most of us really love. If we read a novel that rocks our world, it's because there's something in it that we didn't know already. Not just information but really wisdom - sort of what to do with our information. And wisdom comes from experience.
Barbara KingsolverWant is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind.
Barbara KingsolverVengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them.
Barbara KingsolverLike kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.
Barbara KingsolverI don't know what rituals my kids will carry into adulthood, whether they'll grow up attached to homemade pizza on Friday nights, or the scent of peppers roasting over a fire, or what. I do know that flavors work their own ways under the skin, into the heart of longing. Where my kids are concerned I find myself hoping for the simplest things: that if someday they crave orchards where their kids can climb into the branches and steal apples, the world will have trees enough with arms to receive them.
Barbara KingsolverWars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.
Barbara KingsolverOur house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what's not in it.
Barbara KingsolverLet me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I was afflicted with Africa like a bout of a rare disease from which I have not managed a full recovery.
Barbara KingsolverThe way I see it, a person isn't nothing more than a scarecrow... The only difference between one that stands up good and one that blows over is what kind of a stick they're stuck up there on.
Barbara KingsolverChildren model the behavior of adults, on whatever scale is available to them. Ours are growing up in a nation whose most important, influential men - from presidents to the coolest film characters - solve problems by killing people. ... We have taught our children in a thousand ways, sometimes with flag-waving and sometimes with a laugh track, that the bad guy deserves to die.
Barbara KingsolverIt's as if cats live in a seperate universe that takes up the same space as ours, but is full of facinating things like mice or sparrows or special TV programs that we can't see.
Barbara KingsolverYou never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.
Barbara KingsolverI rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.
Barbara KingsolverMorality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.
Barbara KingsolverThis will be Great Mam's last spring. Her last June apples. Her last fresh roasting ears from the garden.
Barbara KingsolverIn a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.
Barbara KingsolverIn fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We're surrounded by advertising.
Barbara KingsolverI 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.
Barbara KingsolverSomething in me was always watching life from the outside, permanently obsessed with the notion of belonging vs. not-belonging [to a group]. It did not make for a happy childhood, but it was excellent training for a writer.
Barbara KingsolverIn the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.
Barbara KingsolverApril is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant (among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can't keep, all passion is really a setup, and we're doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and would further add: Who cares? Every spring I go out there anyway, around the bend, unconditionally. ... Come the end of the dark days, I am more than joyful. I'm nuts.
Barbara KingsolverThere's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.
Barbara KingsolverAs long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop.
Barbara KingsolverTo people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.
Barbara Kingsolver... Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, 'so far from everything?' When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.
Barbara KingsolverI’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.
Barbara KingsolverOver the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.
Barbara KingsolverGod is frightful, God is great--you pick. I choose this: God is in the details, the completely unnecessary miracles sometimes tossed up as stars to guide us. They are the promise of good fortune in a cloudless day, and the animals in the clouds; look hard enough, and you'll see them. Don't ask if they're real.
Barbara KingsolverFinally, 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.
Barbara KingsolverWrite a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.
Barbara KingsolverWe aimed for no more than to have dominion over every creature that moved upon the earth. And so it came to pass that we stepped down there on a place we believed unformed, where only darkness moved on the face of the waters. Now you laugh, day and night, while you gnaw on my bones. But what else could we have thought? Only that it began and ended with us. What do we know, even now? Ask the children. Look at what they grew up to be. We can only speak of the things we carried with us, and the things we took away.
Barbara KingsolverA choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever.
Barbara KingsolverYour own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.
Barbara KingsolverIn my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again(15).
Barbara KingsolverBe careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.
Barbara Kingsolver