Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

I don't know how you go on, but I really hope you'll keep doing it. That you won't give up esperanza. I thought of that last night. Esperanza is all you get, no second chances. What you have to do is...

I don't know, Magda says, Seems like that's just how it is with you and me. We're like islands on the moon.

I don’t know where to start, Lou Ann, I told her. There’s just so damn much ugliness. Everywhere you look, some big guy kicking some little person when they’re down—look what they do to those people a...

I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.

I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign.

I read in a book that they cut off the workers’ hands if they hadn’t collected enough rubber by the end of the day. The Belgian foremen would bring baskets full of brown hands back to the boss, piled...

I should like to write my books only for the dear person who lies awake reading in bed until page last, then lets the open book fall gently on her face, to touch her smile or drink her tears.

I suppose it is in our nature, she said finally. When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.

I think most people are the same. Until they’ve gone somewhere.

I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, and learned to love what I could lose.

I was occupied so entirely by each day, I felt detached from anything so large as a month or a year. History didn't cross my mind. Now it does. Now I know, whatever your burdens, to hold yourself apar...

I went a day. Spent that evening standing at the window lighting one cigarette off the last, after she’d gone, to keep myself from sitting and writing out the scene as freshly recalled. One week, thir...

I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue.

If a friend had a coronary scare and finally started exercising three days a week, who would hound him about the other four days? It’s the worst of bad manners—and self-protection, I think, in a nervo...

If people really gave it full consideration, I mean, like if you could return a baby after thirty days’ examination like one of those Time-Life books, then I figure the entire human species would go e...

If you can't live by the laws the LORD God made for the world, they'll go into effect regardless.

If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.

If you're standing in the manure pile, it's somebody's job to mention the stink.

Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.

In a lifetime of hearing people celebrate weekends, she finally saw what all the fuss was about. By no means did her workload cease on Saturday, but it did shift gears. If her kids wanted to pull ever...