Barbara Kingsolver (b.1955) is an American novelist, essayist, poet, and activist focusing on social justice, feminism, biodiversity, and the relationship of humans to their environment.
Born in Annapolis, Maryland, Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky. She studied biology at DePauw University, traveled and worked in Europe before returning to America, and then attended graduate school at the University of Arizona.
Kingsolver’s best-known novels including The Bean Trees (1988,) With the Poisonwood Bible (1999,) Prodigal Summer (2001,) The Lacuna (2009,) Flight Behavior (2012,) and Unsheltered (2018) concern the tenacity of people living in inhospitable environments.
Kingsolver’s poetry collection Another America / Otra America (1991) brings to light the struggles of impoverished women against sexual and political abuse, war, and death. Her essay collections include High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never (1995,) Small Wonder (2002,) and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007)—the latter discusses the environmental consequences of human consumption and her family’s “locavores” experiment with consuming decision food produced locally.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Barbara Kingsolver
Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you’ll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can’t stand it.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Life
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.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Perseverance
Wars 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 Kingsolver
Topics: Life
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.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Dreams
The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of a dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Friend, Friendship, Discovery
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Pain, Self-Discovery
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Hope
Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Betrayal
This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it “to the editor who can appreciate my work” and it has simply come back stamped “not at this address”. Just keep looking for the right address.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Work
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Memories, Memory
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.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Self-Discovery
Codi: “So you think we all just have animal dreams. We can’t think of anything to dream except our ordinary lives”.
Loyd: “Only if you have an ordinary life. If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life”.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Dreams
The truth needs so little rehearsal.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Honesty
It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Memories, Memory
It wasn’t a matter of courage or dreams, but something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I’d spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Dreams
Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? (referring to cliff dwellings)
Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.
—Barbara Kingsolver
Topics: Civilization
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