Barbara Kingsolver Quote
I’d like to ask those who favor this position if they would be willing to go to Littleton and explain to some mothers what constitutes an acceptable risk. Really. Because in a society that embraces violence, this is what our way of life has come to mean. The question can’t be why but only Why yours and not mine? We have taught our children in a thousand ways, sometimes with flag-waving and sometimes with a laugh track, that the bad guy deserves to die. But we easily forget a crucial component of this formula: Bad is defined by the aggressor. Any of our children may someday be, in someone’s mind, the bad guy.
Barbara Kingsolver
I’d like to ask those who favor this position if they would be willing to go to Littleton and explain to some mothers what constitutes an acceptable risk. Really. Because in a society that embraces violence, this is what our way of life has come to mean. The question can’t be why but only Why yours and not mine? We have taught our children in a thousand ways, sometimes with flag-waving and sometimes with a laugh track, that the bad guy deserves to die. But we easily forget a crucial component of this formula: Bad is defined by the aggressor. Any of our children may someday be, in someone’s mind, the bad guy.
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About Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver has received numerous awards, including the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award 2011 and the National Humanities Medal. After winning for The Lacuna in 2010 and Demon Copperhead in 2023, Kingsolver became the first author to win the Women's Prize for Fiction twice. Since 1993, each one of her book titles have been on the New York Times Best Seller list.
Kingsolver was raised in rural Kentucky, lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood, and she currently lives in Virginia, in the Appalachia region. Kingsolver earned degrees in biology, ecology, and evolutionary biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona, and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. In 2000, the politically progressive Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize to support "literature of social change".