Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in Africa 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 most famous 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.
Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments. Each of her books published since 1993 have been on The New York Times Best Seller list. Kingsolver has received numerous awards, including the UK's Orange Prize for Fiction 2010, for The Lacuna and the National Humanities Medal. She has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
In 2000, Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize to support "literature of social change."
Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland in 1955 and grew up in Carlisle in rural Kentucky. When Kingsolver was seven years old, her father, a physician, took the family to the former Republic of Congo in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her parents worked in a public health capacity, and the family lived without electricity or running water.
After graduating from high school, Kingsolver attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana on a music scholarship, studying classical piano. Eventually, however, she changed her major to biology when she realized that "classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest of [them:] get to play 'Blue Moon' in a hotel lobby." She was involved in activism on her campus, and took part in protests against the Vietnam war. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1977, and moved to France for a year before settling in Tucson, Arizona, where she would live for much of the next two decades. In 1980 she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Arizona, where she earned a Master's degree in ecology and evolutionary biology.
Kingsolver began her full-time writing career in the mid 1980s as a science writer for the university, which eventually lead to some freelance feature writing. She began her career in fiction writing after winning a short story contest in a local Phoenix newspaper. In 1985 she married Joseph Hoffmann; their daughter Camille was born in 1987. She moved with her daughter to Tenerife in the Canary Islands for a year during the first Gulf war, mostly due to frustration over America's military involvement. After returning to the US in 1992, she separated from her husband.
In 1994, Kingsolver was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from her alma mater, DePauw University. She was also married to Steven Hopp, that year, and their daughter, Lily, was born in 1996. In 2004, Kingsolver moved with her family to a farm in Washington County, Virginia, where they currently reside. In 2008, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Duke University, where she delivered a commencement address entitled "How to be Hopeful".
In a 2010 interview with The Guardian, Kingsolver says, "I never wanted to be famous, and still don't, [...:] the universe rewarded me with what I dreaded most." She says created her own website just to compete with a plethora of fake ones, "as a defence to protect my family from misinformation. Wikipedia abhors a vacuum. If you don't define yourself, it will get done for you in colourful ways."
“Heroes may be less than heroic, while the common man saves the day.”
“Eyes can pierce a skull.”
“God speaks for the silent man.”
“We aimed for no more than to have dominion over every creature that moved upon the earth. And so it came to pass that we stepped down there on a place we believed unformed, where only darkness moved on the face of the waters. Now you laugh, day and night, while you gnaw on my bones. But what else could we have thought? Only that it began and ended with us. What do we know, even now? Ask the children. Look at what they grew up to be. We can only speak of the things we carried with us, and the things we took away.”
“You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.”
“To think is not always to see.”
“Because nothing wondrous can come in this world unless it rests on the shoulders of kindness.”
“War so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.”
“Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.”
“What a knot of history one mistake can become.”
“There will never be another Frida.”
“Look, if I don't flirt with you, you should take that as a compliment. I don't always respect myself, but I almost never respect men. They're like flowers all showy, a lot of color and lust. You pick them and throw them on the ground. But you I respect. I always did. From the first day I saw you.”
“It was a true conversation. About whether our ancestors had more important lives than we do. And how they've managed to trick us, if they did not.”
“You could allow a gentleman the privacy of his piss.”
“What do you think people want, if it's not greatness and to be remembered for all time?""Mostly? I believe people want to eat a good lunch, and then take a good piss.”
“Greatness is very boring.”
“Isn't it awfully sad to thing that's all history amounts to, just following the next stupid fashion?”
“You talk about her as if she is the Notre Dame Cathedral!" "She is. And the Statue of Liberty and Abbey Road and the best burrito of your life. Didn't you know?”
“Modern people are just like ancient ones, only more numerous.”
“It was his habit, when he rewrote anything, to shed himself of all earlier versions. He kept a clean house.”
“Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence.”
“In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.”
“Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!”
“Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man's skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people's back yards.”
“We are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.”
“Sept 15 1930 at the independence festival of the school of cretins…"At the head of the table by the bowl of pomegranates, Senora Bartolome had put a note: Take only one, our Lord Jesus is watching!.A second note appeared at the foot of the table beside the sugared almonds: Take all you want, Jesus is looking at the pomegranates.”
“I vow I shall give all my very best books to the underprivileged, once I have read them”
“I found the right (Valentine) card to send her. On the cover there were hearts, and it said, "Here's hoping you'll soon have something big and strong around the house to open those tight jar lids." Inside was a picture of a pipe wrench.”
“I'm too fascinated to hide indoors or stay cooped up in our yard. Curiosity killed the cat, I know, but I try to land on my feet.”
“Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.”
“Roscoe and his friends are studying the heat of the fire and the level of oil in the pot with the attitude men take on occasions like this, feeling the weight of their supervisory powers. Sugar smiles. A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't, this world would end at once.”
“Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.”
“You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what's broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it's broken, you are automatically disqualified.”
“she's never forgotten, either, how a mystery caught in the hand could lose its grace”
“Mi'ija, in a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can.”
“As I looked at her there among the pumpkins I was overcome with the color and the intesity of my life. In these moments we are driven to try and hoard happiness by taking photographs, but I know better. The improtant thing was what the colors stood for, the taste of hard apples and the existence of Lena and the exact quality of the sun on the last warm day in October. A photograph would have flattened the scene into a happy moment, whereas what I felt was rapture. The fleeting certainty that I deserved this space I'd been taking up on this earth, and all the air I had breathed.”
“You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It's what these guys have decided to call America. They have the audacity to say, 'There, you sons of bitches, don't lay a finger on it. That is a finished product.'""But any country is still in the making. Always. That's just history, people have to see that.”
“Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what's not in it.”
“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.”
“The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment's pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence.”
“If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.”
“This household is like a pocketful of coins that jingled together for a time, but now have been slapped on a counter to pay a price. The pocket empties out, the coins venture back into the infinite circulation of currency, separate, invisible, and untraceable.”
“Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.”
“The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.”
“My prior experience with young men was to hear them swear 'Christ almighty in the craphouse!' at any dress with too many buttons.”
“Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn't.”
“I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue.”
“A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.”
“But nothing on this earth is guaranteed, when you get right down to it, you know? I've been thinking about that. About how your kids aren't really YOURS, they're just these people that you try to keep an eye on, and hope you'll all grow up someday to like each other and still be in one piece. What I mean is, everything you get is really just on loan. Does that make sense?""Sure," I said. "Like library books. Sooner or later they've all got to go back into the nightdrop.”
“I felt the breath of God go cold against my skin.”