Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

It's what you do that makes your soul not the other way around.

I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass.

Children - even when they have endured the unthinkable - have a gift for divining the moment when the grown-ups really need to lighten up.

It's a relief to share the uncomplicated affection that has passed between people and their dogs for thousands of years.

On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to s...

Quoting Díaz: Only in her home, like a butterfly in a glass jar, can woman progress to her highest level of decency.

I think maybe it is true that the idle mind is the Devil's workshop.

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

She looked like Cinderella in reverse, stepped out from her life at the ball for a day of misery among the ashes.

Thought of the way a tree will keep on growing after a fence is wired around its trunk. The unbelievable force of that expansion. And I let her go.

I'm out of the habit. I've spent years trying not to want. Just, you know, as an endeavor, like quitting smoking.

Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn't.

So much energy squandered in the unwinnable war waged by woman against the life-form she is.

Today was the day. Every day was the day.

What kind of weirdo makes cheese? It's too hard to imagine, too homespun, too something. We're so alienated from the creation of even ordinary things we eat or use, each one seems to need its own publ...

But Dovey was one of those people who traveled in a medium-size pod of tardiness on which others came to rely.

The larger the corporation, the more distant its motives are apt to be from the original spirit of organic farming—and the farther the products will likely be shipped to buyers who will smile at the h...

It was his habit, when he rewrote anything, to shed himself of all earlier versions. He kept a clean house.

It's the worst of bad manners to ridicule the small gesture...Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren't trivial. Ultimately they will, or won't, add up to having been the thing that mattered.

Don Enrique says a full moon pulls up the highest tides of the month, at midday and midnight. And it pulls them down to their lowest ebb when it is rising or setting. So says a man in a frock coat and...