Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

When the public nerve is aroused, the most impressive capacity of man is his skill for lying.

The last generation's worst fears became the next one's B-grade entertainment.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

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

It was hard to see where all this could possibly go when it melted.

To stomp about the world ignoring cultural differences is arrogant, to be sure, but perhaps there is another kind of arrogance in the presumption that we may ever really build a faultless bridge from...

It’s a funny thing to complain about, but most of America is perfectly devoid of smells. I must have noticed it before, but this last time back I felt it as an impairment. For weeks after we arrived I...

It is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell. 

You just read your books and go on a hundred miles away, You ignore me.

The longer I think about a food industry organized around an animal that cannot reproduce itself without technical assistance, the more I mistrust it. Poultry, a significant part of the modern diet, i...

For scientists, reality is not optional.

There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.

The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.

If chained is where you have been, your ams will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or...

But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation's hopes will di...

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.

People ask without wanting to know.

Because nothing wondrous can come in this world unless it rests on the shoulders of kindness.

My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I alwa...