Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
Barbara Kingsolver
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.
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 older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.
Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.
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.
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.
The truth needs so little rehearsal.
Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another 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.
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
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.
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.
It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
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.
I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political.
It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.
Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don't know what I'm looking for. I just do it.
To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!
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.
We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.
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.
My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head.
I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.
In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career - my anti-job - that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.
Most of my books have been about the complex ways an individual depends on community.
I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.
I was trained in classical piano, but it kind of dawned on me that classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest of us get to play 'Blue Moon' in a hotel lobby.
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.
After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.
Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
For me, writing time has always been precious, something I wait for and am eager for and make the best use of. That's probably why I get up so early and have writing time in the quiet dawn hours, when no one needs me.
I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.
I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.
I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.
People in my novels always have terrible problems. If they are not terrible, I make them more terrible.
At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted.
As a biologist, I can't think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.
When people are frightened about going hungry and paying their mortgages, a scarcity model begins to prevail; they fear someone else will get their piece of the pie.
Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave. I never get over being thankful for that - for the courage of my readers.
It's a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.
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'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.
Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.
