Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolveris an American novelist, essayist and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood. Kingsolver earned degrees in biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a non-fiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth8 April 1955
CountryUnited States of America
I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.
I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.
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.
I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
I don't bring expectations to any of my books. I don't tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.
You think you're the foreigner here, and I'm the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner, too.
The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.
We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.
A 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.
On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature's jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck?... I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist.