Barbara Kingsolver — American Novelist born on April 08, 1955,

Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the Congo 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 widely known 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... (wikipedia)

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.
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.
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.