Barbara Kingsolver Quotes & Sayings

Our plans are small and somewhat absurd. — Barbara Kingsolver

You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next. — Barbara Kingsolver

I have tried to teach my children to love nature as my parents taught that reverence to me
through example, proximity, and plenty of field guides and age-appropriate biology books. — Barbara Kingsolver

The question is, why do you think you can't be a writer?"
"To be a writer, you need readers."
"I'm no painter, then. Who ever looks at my little dumb pieces of shit? — Barbara Kingsolver

you always write about individualism vs. community, and that you see independence as stupidity and instead celebrate dependency. — Barbara Kingsolver

Certain ramshackle aspects of Dellarobia had also gone undercover, it seemed, just like the snow-covered barns. Some defects lurked, but for now her way seemed clear. She'd made plans. — Barbara Kingsolver

south, moving slowly. It looked something like a huge blue-gray shower curtain being drawn along by the hand of God. You could just barely see through it, enough to make — Barbara Kingsolver

U.S. policies restrict feeding cow tissue directly to other cows, but still allow cows to be fed to other animals (like chickens) and the waste from the chickens to be fed back to the cows. — Barbara Kingsolver

Hope is a renewable option:
If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning. — Barbara Kingsolver

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 apart from the lot of more powerful men is an illusion. On that awful day in January 1961, Lumumba paid with a life and so did I. On the wings of an owl the fallen Congo came to haunt even our little family, we messengers of goodwill adrift on a sea of mistaken intentions. — Barbara Kingsolver

Five days and the train has passed through many underworlds. — Barbara Kingsolver

You think you're no good, so you can't do good things. Jesus, Codi, how long are you going to keep limping around on that crutch? It's the other way around, it's what you *do* that makes you who you are. — Barbara Kingsolver

We tap our toes to chaste love songs about the silvery moon without recognizing them as hymns to copulation. — Barbara Kingsolver

My future was mapped in negatives. Next year, I could be anywhere but here. — Barbara Kingsolver

She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on. — Barbara Kingsolver

Silence has many advantages ... I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please. — Barbara Kingsolver

In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We're surrounded by advertising. — Barbara Kingsolver

People ask without wanting to know. — Barbara Kingsolver

A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do. — Barbara Kingsolver

Remember how we use to pray to get invited to birthday parties? And they only asked us because we were so grateful we'd do anything, stay late and help the mothers wash the cake pans. I'm still that girl, flattered to death if somebody wants me around. — Barbara Kingsolver

After a while Estevan said, What I really hate is not belonging in any place. To be unwanted everywhere. — Barbara Kingsolver

I write every moment that is humanly possible. I write every day and every night. The only discipline I lack is the discipline is to quit. — Barbara Kingsolver

You can fool history sometimes, but you can't fool the memory of your intimates. — Barbara Kingsolver

Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off. — Barbara Kingsolver

800 million people are chronically underfed (6 will die of hunger-related causes while you read this article), it's because they lack money and opportunity, not because food is unavailable in their countries. — Barbara Kingsolver

Our journey was to be a great enterprise of balance. My father, of course, was bringing the Word of God - which fortunately weighs nothing at all. — Barbara Kingsolver

Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them ... it works out. — Barbara Kingsolver

Always tried to be positive with her, although I'd learned — Barbara Kingsolver

She never wore a watch, and for this she didn't need one. — Barbara Kingsolver

I tried to recall where I had been at sunup that day. It was in St. Louis, Missouri, where they have that giant McDonald's thing towering over the city, — Barbara Kingsolver

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 one shore to another, or even know where the mist has ceded to landfall. — Barbara Kingsolver

A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder. — Barbara Kingsolver

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

Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It's more like conversation, raising new questions and moving you to answer them for yourself. — Barbara Kingsolver

From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men. — Barbara Kingsolver

I shrugged. I saw a Star Trek episode one time that was along those lines. All the women on this whole planet end up naked. I can't remember exactly, but I think Captain Kirk gets turned into a pipe wrench. — Barbara Kingsolver

Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen. — Barbara Kingsolver

When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration. — Barbara Kingsolver

All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out. — Barbara Kingsolver

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

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that current food production can sustain world food needs even for the 8 billion people who are projected to inhabit the planet in 2030. This will hold even with anticipated increases in meat consumption, and without adding genetically modified crops. — Barbara Kingsolver

If someone does learn about the world from reading a novel of mine, that makes me very happy. It's probably not what brings me into the novel in the first place - I usually am pulled in by some big question about the world and human nature that I'm not going to resolve in the course of the novel. But I'm very devoted to getting my facts straight. — Barbara Kingsolver

I used to think religion was just more of the same thing. Dump responsibility on the big guy. Now I see an importance in that. It's a relief to accept that not everything is under your control. — Barbara Kingsolver

Spring is made of solid, fourteen-karat gratitude, the reward for the long wait. Every religious tradition from the northern hemisphere honors some form of April hallelujah, for this is the season of exquisite redemption, a slam-bang return to joy after a season of cold second thoughts. — Barbara Kingsolver

I'm always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves. — Barbara Kingsolver

Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage. — Barbara Kingsolver

Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise. — Barbara Kingsolver

With these startling honesties glinting up at us from history's broken mirror, it strikes me that this is worth shouting from the rooftops: We could be wrong this time, again. The enemy may not be exactly what we think. It may be a force that resides in many quarters, including inside our skin, in our very words, the questions we frame, the things we love most, the things we can't live without. Our greatest dread may be our salvation. — Barbara Kingsolver

From what he could see she had the legs of a much younger woman. Certainly not what he would have expected in the way of Unitarian legs. — Barbara Kingsolver

Whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. And peace will be with you. — Barbara Kingsolver

I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension. — Barbara Kingsolver

But his kind will always lose in the end. I know this, and now I know why. Whether it's wife or nation they occupy, their mistake is the same: they stand still, and their stake moves underneath them ... Chains rattle, rivers roll, animals startle and bolt, forests inspire and expand, babies stretch open-mouthed from the womb, new seedlings arch their necks and creep forward into the light. Even a language won't stand still. A territory is only possessed for a moment in time. They stake everything on that moment, posing for photographs while planting the flag, casting themselves in bronze ... Even before the flagpole begins to peel and splinter, the ground underneath arches and slides forward into its own new destiny. It may bear the marks of boots on its back, but those marks become the possessions of the land. — Barbara Kingsolver

A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after
oh, that' s love by a different name. — Barbara Kingsolver

Organization is the religion of the single parent. — Barbara Kingsolver

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 public relations team to calm the American subservience to hurry and bring us back around to doing a thing ourselves, at home. — Barbara Kingsolver

Cash misses his wife with a blank pain in his chest, and he misses his sisters and cousins, who have known him since he was a strong, good-looking boy. Everyone back there remembers, or if they are too young, they've been told. The old ones get to hang on the sweet, perfect past. Cash was the best at climbing trees; his sister Letty won the story bees. The woman who married Letty's husband's brother, a beauty named Sugar, was spotted one time drinking a root beer and had her picture in LIFE magazine. They all know. Now she has thin hair and a humped back but she's still Sugar, she gets to walk around Heaven, Oklahoma, with everybody thinking she's pretty and special. which she is. That's the trouble with moving away from family, he realizes. You lose your youth entirely, you have only the small tired baggage that is carried within the body. — Barbara Kingsolver

she considered a language that could carry nothing but love and simple truth. — Barbara Kingsolver

An imperfectly remembered life is a useless treachery. Every day, more fragments of the past roll around heavily in the chambers of an empty brain, shedding bits of color, a sentence or a fragrance, something that changes and then disappears. It drops like a stone to the bottom of the cave. — Barbara Kingsolver

God doesn't need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves. — Barbara Kingsolver

She told him television was a bad influence. Probably she was right. Like those white birds he's been seeing outside the window, it flashes its wings and promises whatever you want, even before you knew you wanted it. — Barbara Kingsolver

Questioning our government's actions does not violate the principles of liberty, equality, and freedom of speech; it exercises them, and by exercise we grow stronger. I have read enough of Thomas Jefferson to feel sure — Barbara Kingsolver

A dog can't think that much about what he's doing, he just does what feels right. — Barbara Kingsolver

There must be transients in the bird world too, rumple-feathered outcasts that naturally seek out each other's company in inferior and dying trees. — Barbara Kingsolver

He spoke for an hour on the nonviolent road to independence. The crowd loved it so much they rioted and killed twelve people. — Barbara Kingsolver

Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed. — Barbara Kingsolver

I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height. — Barbara Kingsolver

WOMEN ON THEIR OWN RUN in Alice's family. This dawns on her with the unkindness of a heart attack and she sits up in bed to get a closer look at her thoughts, which have collected above her in the dark. — Barbara Kingsolver

Water, in Grace, is an all-or-nothing proposition, like happiness. When you have rain you have more than enough, just as when you're happy and in love and content with your life, you can't remember how you ever could have felt cheated by fate. — Barbara Kingsolver

It's as if cats live in a seperate universe that takes up the same space as ours, but is full of facinating things like mice or sparrows or special TV programs that we can't see. — Barbara Kingsolver

My worst nightmare is being stuck somewhere with nothing to read. — Barbara Kingsolver

What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I'm not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall. — Barbara Kingsolver

Plot comes first. The plot is the archictecture of your novel. You wouldn't build a house without a plan. If I wrote without a plot, it would just be a pile of bricks. Characters are your servants. They must serve your plot. — Barbara Kingsolver

But I'll tell you a secret. When I want to take God at his word exactly I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers. — Barbara Kingsolver

Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life. — Barbara Kingsolver

The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage. — Barbara Kingsolver

Until that morning when we all went to the riverbank, I still believed Mother would take Leah, not me. Leah who, even in her malarial stupor, rushed forward to crouch with the battery in the canoe and counter its odd tilt. I was outshone was usual by her heroism. But as we watched that pirogue drift away across the Kwenge, Mother gripped my hand so tightly I understood that I had been chosen. She would drag me out of Africa if it was her last living act as a mother. I think probably it was. — Barbara Kingsolver

Listen. 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. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow. — Barbara Kingsolver

God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much. — Barbara Kingsolver

If a shipment of ground beef somehow gets contaminated with pathogens, our federal government does not have authority to recall the beef, only to request that the company issue a recall. — Barbara Kingsolver

Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky.
But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind. — Barbara Kingsolver

I believe that the people who survive a cataclysm, rather than those who stand by and analyze it, are nearly always the more credible witnesses to their own history. — Barbara Kingsolver

We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that. — Barbara Kingsolver

You can't really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece — Barbara Kingsolver

Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard. — Barbara Kingsolver

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 extinct in a month's time. — Barbara Kingsolver

Many other raw food products--notably poultry from CAFOs--typically carry a much higher threat to human health in terms of pathogen load, and yet the government trusts us to render it safe in our own humble kitchens. But it's easy to see how impossibly strict milk rules might gratify industry lobbyists, by eliminating competition from family producers. — Barbara Kingsolver

I had hoped for a pinch of metaphor. — Barbara Kingsolver

When I was Turtle's age I had never had anyone or anything important taken from me. I still hadn't. Maybe I hadn't started out with a whole lot, but pretty nearly all of it was still with me. — Barbara Kingsolver

God is frightful, God is great
you pick. I choose this: God is in the details, the completely unnecessary miracles sometimes tossed up as stars to guide us. They are the promise of good fortune in a cloudless day, and the animals in the clouds; look hard enough, and you'll see them. Don't ask if they're real. — Barbara Kingsolver

The difference is an objective phenomenon of soil science; what we call "soil" is a community of living, mostly microscopic organisms in a nutrient matrix. Organic farming, by definition, enhances the soil's living and nonliving components. Modern conventional farming is an efficient reduction of that process that adds back just a few crucial nutrients of the many that are removed each year when biomass is harvested ... Chemicals that sterilize the soil destroy organisms that fight plant diseases, aerate, and manufacture fertility. Recent research has discovered that just adding phosphorus (the P in all "NPK" fertilizers) kills the tiny filaments of fungi that help plants absorb nutrients. — Barbara Kingsolver

The jacaranda in the courtyard has put on its bloom. This purple can't be ignored, it's like a tree singing. The walk down Londres Street to the market is a concert: the small jacaranda on the the corner hums the tuning note, then all others in the lane join in. — Barbara Kingsolver

Everyone wants the tallest tree to fall — Barbara Kingsolver

Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt. — Barbara Kingsolver

Symptomatic of this rural-urban identity crisis is our eager embrace of a recently imposed divide: the Red States and the Blue States. That color map comes to us with the suggestion that both coasts are populated by educated civil libertarians, while the vast middle and south are criss-crossed with the studded tracks of ATVs leaving a trail of flying beer cans and rebel yells. Okay, I'm exaggerating a little. But I certainly sense a bit of that when urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, "so far from everything?" (When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.) — Barbara Kingsolver

admired their own steadfast lives. Right up to the day when hope in all its versions went out of stock, — Barbara Kingsolver

Peace and Love, get high and fly with the dove. — Barbara Kingsolver

I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils? — Barbara Kingsolver

Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break. — Barbara Kingsolver

Even the vendors sitting on stools around the periphery work steadily at connection, nodding at potential buyers, like a sewing machine prodding its needle into the cloth. — Barbara Kingsolver

Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don't; but we wear it all the same — Barbara Kingsolver