Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

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 read what Hallie said about not wanting to save the world, that you didn’t choose your road for the reward at the end, but for the way it felt as you went along.

I see books as windows out of a little life into the great world.Writing fiction is a dance. It's controlled lunacy. Hearing voices in your head — they give people drugs for that.

I think of my canning as fast food, paid for in time up front.

I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

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

I'll lead you to the river of knowledge. You can catch your own damn fish.

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'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.

If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil...

If that is our nature, then nature is madness. These are more dangerous times than we ever have known.

If you go to visit hell, you will see a room like this kitchen. There is a pot of delicious stew on the table, with the most delicate aroma you can imagine. All around, people sit, like us. Only they...

Imagine if each of these grew to be a maple. There should be no room in Vineland for us to stand between them. It’s the same with mice or dandelions. Many more seeds and pups are dropped than may pros...

In almost thirty years of walking around on the grass of the world, she couldn't recall having spent two minutes alone with a butterfly.

In her experience people had worries or they had tons of money, not both.

Isn't it awfully sad to thing that's all history amounts to, just following the next stupid fashion?

It ran deeper than that. I’d lost what there was to lose: first my mother and then my baby. Nothing you love will stay. Hallie could call that attitude a crutch, but she didn’t know, she hadn’t loved...

It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees.

It's frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets rough you fall back on whatever awful think you grew up with.