Kingsolver Quotes & Sayings

Wardrobe of Denial. Blanchie glanced — Barbara Kingsolver

Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child. — Barbara Kingsolver

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

Modern people are just like ancient ones, only more numerous. — 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

We do have some strong traditions of community in the United States, but it's interesting to me that our traditionally patriotic imagery in this country celebrates the individual, the solo flier, independence. We celebrate Independence Day; we don't celebrate We Desperately Rely on Others Day. Oh, I guess that's Mother's Day [laughter]. It does strike me that our great American mythology tends to celebrate separate achievement and separateness, when in fact nobody does anything alone. — Barbara Kingsolver

I think that when people read fiction, they're really reading for wisdom. I am. That's what most of us really love. If we read a novel that rocks our world, it's because there's something in it that we didn't know already. Not just information but really wisdom - sort of what to do with our information. And wisdom comes from experience. — 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

Growing food was the first activity that gave us enough prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories, and build our cities. — Barbara Kingsolver

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

GM [genetically modified] plants are virtually everywhere in the US food chain, but don't have to be labeled, and aren't. Industry lobbyists intend to keep it that way. — Barbara Kingsolver

Nothing was more wonderful than waiting for a happiness you could be sure of. — Barbara Kingsolver

The sting of a fly, the Congolese say, can launch the end of the world. How simply things begin. — Barbara Kingsolver

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

The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do. — Barbara Kingsolver

Mother, you can still hold hold on but forgive, forgive and give for long as long as we both shall live, I forgive you, Mother. — Barbara Kingsolver

I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe; I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives. — Barbara Kingsolver

When you awaken love and laughter, your mind let's go of fear and anxiety, and your happy spirit becomes the healing balm that transforms every aspect of your human experience. — Barbara Kingsolver

That night marks my life's dark center, the moment when growing up ended and the long downward slope toward death began. The wonder to me now is that I thought myself worth saving ... I reached out and clung for life with my good left hand like a claw, grasping at moving legs to raise myself from the dirt. Desperate to save myself in a river of people saving themselves. And if they chanced to look down and see me struggling underneath them, they saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious. That is what it means to be a beast in the kingdom. — Barbara Kingsolver

Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain. — 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

Nathan was something that happened to us, as devastating in its way as the burning roof that fell on the family Mwanza; with our fate scarred by hell and brimstone we still had to track our course. And it happened finally by the grace of hell and brimstone that I had to keep moving. I moved, and he stood still. — Barbara Kingsolver

What you hold in your hands right now, beneath these words, is consecrated air and time and sunlight and, first of all, a place. — Barbara Kingsolver

And somehow Hallie thrived anyway--the blossom of our family, like one of those miraculous fruit trees that taps into an invisible vein of nurture and bears radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on living. In Grace, in the old days, when people found one of those in their orchard they called it the semilla besada--the seed that got kissed. Sometimes you'd run across one that people had come to, and returned to, in hopes of a blessing. The branches would be festooned like a Christmas tree of family tokens: a baby sock, a pair of broken reading glasses, the window envelope of a pension check. — Barbara Kingsolver

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

The effect is both domestic and wild, equal parts geometric and chaotic. It's the visual signature of small, diversified farms that creates the picture-postcard landscape here, along with its celebrated gastronomic one. Couldn't Americans learn to love landscapes like these around our cities, treasuring them not just gastronomically but aesthetically, instead of giving everything over to suburban development? Can we only love agriculture on postcards? — Barbara Kingsolver

Lies are infinite in number, and the truth so small and singular. — Barbara Kingsolver

There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line ... People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It's a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing. — Barbara Kingsolver

Before that I was a scientist. I did research in population biology. And that's what I always go back to, it helps me to remember that people are not the end of the world, although we may be when it comes to it. We're just one species among millions in this world. — Barbara Kingsolver

You're asking yourself, Can I give this child the best possible upbringing and keep her out of harm's way her whole life long? The answer is no, you can't. But nobody else can either. Not a state home, that's for sure. For heaven's sake, the best they can do is turn their heads while the kids learn to pick locks and snort hootch, and then try to keep them out of jail. Nobody can protect a child from the world. That's why it's the wrong thing to ask, if you're really trying to make a decision."
So what's the right thing to ask?"
Do I want to try? Do I think it would be interesting, maybe even enjoyable in the long run, to share my life with this kid and give her my best effort and maybe, when all's said and done, end up with a good friend. — Barbara Kingsolver

A woman without a man
a condition of 'manlessness'
is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife. — Barbara Kingsolver

Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn't it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway. — Barbara Kingsolver

some secrets kept themselves, out of a failure to stand up to the competing rumors. She — Barbara Kingsolver

In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune. — Barbara Kingsolver

If the Lord hasn't got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that's his business. — Barbara Kingsolver

It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer. — Barbara Kingsolver

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity. — Barbara Kingsolver

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

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

Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave. — Barbara Kingsolver

She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn't. — Barbara Kingsolver

I read as if time were running out, because technically it is. As I grow older I find I'm increasingly impatient with mediocre entertainments; I want books that will take my breath away and realign my vision - Barbara Kingsolver — Pat Williams

After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth. — 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

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

I don't see why you're not just going for this.' Dovey looked her in the eyes, in the mirror. 'You are a rocket. You go for thing, Dellarobia. That is you. When did you ever not?'
Dellarobia shut her eyes. 'When there was nothing out there to land on, I guess.'
'Now, see,' Dovey clucked, 'that's a woman thing. Men and kids get to just light out and fly, without even worrying about what comes next. — Barbara Kingsolver

My way of finding a place in this world is to write one. — Barbara Kingsolver

There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that ... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe. — Barbara Kingsolver

I will read anything by Laura Hillenbrand, Walter Isaacson, Barbara Kingsolver, John le Carre, John Grisham, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Anna Quindlen and Alice Walker. — Hillary Clinton

There are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I'm concerned that's like accusing a dog of having a bark! — Barbara Kingsolver

Southern Appalachians have been ridiculed since the country began. In fiction, they're usually depicted in a cartoonish manner. The region is poor, and very suspicious of outsiders, so there's a sort of 'us versus them' situation. They're easy to poke fun at. — Barbara Kingsolver

A flower is your cousin ... Sometimes a person has got to take a life, like a chicken's or a hog's when you need it ... But nobody is so hungry they need to kill a flower. Cherokee great-grandmother — Barbara Kingsolver

Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind of all one. You know what Hester told me when we were working the sheep one time? She said it's no good to complain about your flock, because it's the put-together of all your past choices. — Barbara Kingsolver

Already? How can this be?" I would ask, shattered by the terrible truth that I needed a three-ring binder and some #2 pencils. It's not that school was a bad thing. Summer was just so much better. — Barbara Kingsolver

I've seen how you can't learn anything when you're trying to look like the smartest person in the room. — Barbara Kingsolver

Until that moment I'd thought I could have it both ways; to be one of them, and also my husband's wife. What conceit! I was his instrument, his animal. Nothing more. How we wives and mothers do perish at the hands of our own righteousness. I was just one more of those women who clamp their mouths shut and wave the flag as their nation rolls off to conquer another in war. Guilty or innocent, they have everything to lose. They are what there is to lose. A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars. — Barbara Kingsolver

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

The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes. — Barbara Kingsolver

The things I carry closest to my heart are things I can't own. — Barbara Kingsolver

There is no life raft' you're just freaking swimming all the time. — Barbara Kingsolver

48-point type, a letter size that big-city newspapers probably reserve for special occasions such as Armageddon. Out here in the heartland, we are not waiting that long. Our local paper's stance on the great big headline letters is: You got 'em, you use 'em. — Barbara Kingsolver

Eyes can pierce a skull. — Barbara Kingsolver

I think most people are the same. Until they've gone somewhere. — Barbara Kingsolver

Away, down below now, single file on the path, comes a woman with four girls in tow, all of them in shirtwaist dresses. Seen from above this way they are pale, doomed blossoms, bound to appeal to your sympathies. Be careful. Later on you'll have to decide what sympathy they deserve. — Barbara Kingsolver

Natalya hugged him hard, already torn with remorse over the forces that govern this family. "No, Seva, you won't be allowed to capture it," she said.
"Your grandfather believes in freedom. — Barbara Kingsolver

restraint equals indulgence — Barbara Kingsolver

It's just lucky for Father he never had any sons. He might have been forced to respect them. — Barbara Kingsolver

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 always wake with sentences pouring into my head. — 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

Once the rains abated, my father's garden thrived in the heat like an unleashed temper. — Barbara Kingsolver

All human odes are essentially one. "My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it." Personally — 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

A journalist's job is to collect information," Ovid said to Pete.
"Nope," Pete said. "That's what we do. It's not what they do."
Dellarobia was unready to be pushed out of the conversation just like that. "Then what do you think the news people drive their Jeeps all the way out here for?"
"To shore up the prevailing view of their audience and sponsors."
"Pete takes a dim view of his fellow humans," Ovid said. "He prefers insects.
Dellarobia turned her chair halfway around to face Pete, scraping noisily against the cement floor. "You're saying people only tune in to news they know they're going to agree with?"
"Bingo," said Pete. — Barbara Kingsolver

A hundred different paths may lighten the world's load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. — Barbara Kingsolver

Thomas Jefferson presumed on the basis of colonial experience that farming and democracy are intimately connected. Cultivation of land meets the needs of the farmer, the neighbors, and the community, and and keeps people independent from domineering centralized powers. In Jefferson's time, [George] was the king. In ours, it's multinational corporations. — Barbara Kingsolver

He lifts her breasts, which fit perfectly into his hands, though he knows this is no promise that he gets to keep them. A million things you can't have will fit in a human hand. — Barbara Kingsolver

There's people I love. But there's so many other kinds of love, too. And people act so hateful to every kind but their own. — Barbara Kingsolver

I was a skeleton with flesh and clothes and thoughts. — Barbara Kingsolver

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? — Barbara Kingsolver

But still, I'd be darned if I was going to be one of those Americans who stomp around Italy barking commands in ever-louder English. I was going to be one of those Americans who traversed Italy with my forehead knit in concentration, divining wordsw from their Latin roots and answering by wedging French cognates into Italian pronunciations spliced onto a standard Spanish verb conjugation. — Barbara Kingsolver

Feminine' was a test like some witch trial she was preordained to fail. — 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

Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility — Barbara Kingsolver

Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used. — Barbara Kingsolver

A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't, this world would end at once. — Barbara Kingsolver

Most of us are creatures so comforted by habit, it can take something on the order of religion to invoke new, more conscious behaviors
however glad we may be afterward that we went to the trouble. — Barbara Kingsolver

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

You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm. — Barbara Kingsolver

Science doesn't tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is. — Barbara Kingsolver

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. Even the child Ruth May touched history. Everyone is complicit. The okapi complied by living, and the spider by dying. It would have lived if it could. Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger. — Barbara Kingsolver

A flower is a plant's way of making love. — Barbara Kingsolver

Maybe life doesn't get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we're willing to find: small wonders, where they grow. — Barbara Kingsolver

The spiraling flights of moths appear haphazard only because of the mechanisms of olfactory tracking are so different from our own. Using binocular vision, we judge the location of an object by comparing the images from two eyes and tracking directly toward the stimulus. But for species relying on the sense of smell, the organism compares points in space, moves in the direction of the greater concentration, then compares two more points successively, moving in zigzags toward the source. Using olfactory navigation the moth detects currents of scent in the air and, by small increments, discovers how to move upstream. — Barbara Kingsolver

What we suffered in our lives we went through together, but somehow we came out different doors, on different ground levels. — Barbara Kingsolver

Shoes, then, sliding me across the floor to greet the day. Dreaming of coffee. I'm afraid I didn't miss the physical presence of my husband in his absences as much as I missed coffee. — Barbara Kingsolver

There are days when I am envious of my hens:
when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure
as a single daily egg. — Barbara Kingsolver

... praise any word that can hold you. Praise all but the vanishing point where we stand now, not quite parted. Already memories fall like blows. But soon they will be treasure, dropped like gold through a miser's fingers as he makes his accounts ... Praise each insomniac hour, kept wide awake by your glow. Sleep would only have robbed more coins from this vandal hoarded store. — Barbara Kingsolver