Barbara Kingsolver Believe Quotations

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 believe with all my heart in delivering on my contract with my readers. They've got plenty of other things to do, so I had better give them a reason to turn every one of these 550 pages. This is my promise: I solemnly swear I'll make you laugh out loud at least once, cry a little in private, and burn whatever you left on the stove.

Pay attention to your passions. They are the key to starting and finishing the book you are meant to write. I don't believe in talent. I believe in passion.

I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.

This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.

A novel can educate to some extent, but first a novel has to entertain. That's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page. I have a commitment to accessibility. I believe in plot. I want an English professor to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want the people I grew up with - who may not often read anything but the Sears catalog - to read my books.

I believe that the people who survive a cataclysm, rather than those who stand by and analyze it, are nearly always the more credible witnesses to their own history.

Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility

Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.

We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.

There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.

He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.

I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe; I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.

Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It's more like conversation, raising new questions and moving you to answer them for yourself.