Quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.