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
There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.
Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.
You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.
There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.
We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it's going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
As 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.
It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.
Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.
The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, 'We already did. We have made the world new.' The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on.
It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.