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
A writer's occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.
Children 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.
I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.
Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.
School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
We must surely appear to the world as exactly what we are: a nation that organizes its economy around consuming twice as much oil as it produces, and around the profligate wastefulness of the wars and campaigns required to defend such consumption. In recent years we have defined our national interest largely in terms of the oil fields and pipelines we need to procure fuel.
If it's important, your heart remembers.
For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.
I look at my four boys, who are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether.
I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.
The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.
The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually bring down the charming, infuriating naïveté of Americans that allows us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret ugliness that bring us whatever we want.
The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go.
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?