Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.

I'll never get over my grappling for balance, never stop believing life is going to be , the minute we can clear up all these mistakes of the temporarily misguided.

I'd forgotten how trees full of bird sounds made you sense the world differently: that life didn't just stop at eye level.

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 was struck with how full a silence could be: a Carolina wren sang from the eave of the shed; cedar waxwings carried on whispery bickerings up in the cherry; a mockingbird did an odd jerky dance, as...

I vow I shall give all my very best books to the underprivileged, once I have read them

I thought I’d had a pretty hard life. But I keep finding out that life can be hard in ways I never knew about.

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. If that is our nature, then nature is madn...

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 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 love it for what it tells me about life. I love fiction, strangely enough, for how true it is, If it can tell me something I didn't already know, or maybe suspected but never framed quite that way,...

I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white...

I know how people are with their habits of mind... as a husband quits a wife, leaving her with her naked body curled around the emptied-out mine of her womb. I know people. Most have no earthly notion...

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 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 what rituals my kids will carry into adulthood, whether they'll grow up attached to homemade pizza on Friday nights, or the scent of peppers roasting over a fire, or what. I do know that...

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 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 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 am like God, Codi? Like GOD? Give me a break. If I get another letter that mentions SAVING THE WORLD, I am sending you, by return mail, a letter bomb. Codi, please. I've got things to do.You say you...