Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

Greatness is very boring.

He behaves as if he had no dead children. The real Leandro never comes here. He only pretends.

He doesn't even look at her because there is too much there, and he's afraid. She is his first child, his favorite, every mistake he ever made.

He noticed the children less and less. He was hardly a father except in the vocational sense, as a potter with clay to be molded.

He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.

Her name, he says like the Lord's taken in vain. Sometimes he says Mexico, and the word has nothing in it at all. A wall with no colors painted on it.

Here in the eastern woodlands we have the black, common, tulip, and white morels, and one unfortunate little cousin called (I am so sorry) the Dog Pecker.

Heroes may be less than heroic, while the common man saves the day.

His mustache made two curved lines around the sides of his mouth like parentheses, as if everything he might say would be very quiet, and incidental.

His scent burst onto her brain like a rain of lights, causing her to know him perfectly. This is how moths speak to each other. The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.

How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.

I am losing faith in such a simple thing as despising an enemy with unequivocal righteousness.

I am not sure how so many Americans came to believe only our wealthy are capable of honoring a food aesthetic.

I asked Elsie how much food they needed from outside the community. 'Flour and sugar,' she said, and then thought a bit. 'Sometimes we'll buy pretzels as a splurge.'It crossed my mind that the world's...

I became determined to know a few steps more of that path every day.

I believe I'm very happy.

I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? T...

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understan...

I could see that the whole idea and business of Childhood was nothing guaranteed. It seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown-u...

I don't expect to see perfection before I die. Lord, if I did I would have stuck my head in the oven back in Tucson, after hearing the stories of some of those refugees. What keeps you going isn't som...