Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

There but for the grace of serotonin go the rest of us.

There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, There now, hang on, you’ll get over it. Sadness is more or less like a head cold—with patience, it passes....

There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes....

There will never be another Frida.

They all attended Hester's church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.

This I need to be told? she’d snapped. As if, sitting in this kitchen where she felt the disapproving presence of his dead mother, she could forget where he’d grown up. Cole was the youngest of six ch...

This came as a strange letdown, to see how the game always went to those who knew the rules without understanding the lesson.

This marriage has failed to warm her.

To hear you tell it, you'd think man was only put on this earth to keep urinals from going to waste.

To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.

To think is not always to see.

Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so dri...

We are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.

We cannot jump to conclusions. All we can do is measure and count. That is the task of science.

We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families’ tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lun...

We only knew, somewhat abstractly, we were going to spend a year integrating our food choices with our family values, which include both love your neighbor and try not to wreck every blooming thing on...

Weeds are job security for the gardener.

Were the beaux less generous over time? Her assets less marketable? If she had lived to be old, would she have resided in a teacup, to be sipped at intervals beneath some gray moustache?

We’d worked so hard for God’s favor, yet it seemed God was still waiting for some extra labor on our part, and it was up to my father to figure out what.

What Aunt Tess loved to say was: Sugar, it’s no parade but you’ll get down the street one way or another, so you’d just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up your pace.