Barbara Kingsolver

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

Terms like that, 'Humane Society, ' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

I've always seen the world through the eyes of a scientist. I love the predictable outcomes that science gives us, the control over the world that that can render.

I used to think religion was just more of the same thing. Dump responsibility on the big guy. Now I see an importance in that. It's a relief to accept that not everything is under your control.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted.

There'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.

I can count all the ways in which being a mother has enriched my understanding of the world, of character, my sense of the future and my attachment to it. I can't imagine what kind of writer I'd be if I didn't have my kids.

I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other. And living on the border between Mexico and the U.S. for so many years gave me a lot of insight into that.

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.