Top 100 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
#1. Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
Barbara Kingsolver
#2. People automatically estimate a mom's IQ at around her children's ages, maybe dividing by the number of kids, rounding up to the nearest pajama size.
Barbara Kingsolver
#3. Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.
Barbara Kingsolver
#5. 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
#6. It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise
Barbara Kingsolver
#7. Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they're afraid to plant themselves?
Barbara Kingsolver
#8. They said it was to be a revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants' rooms because they didn't believe in laundry maids or cooks.
Nobody does, really. Why should they? Only in having clean clothes, clean floors, and enchiladas tapatias.
Barbara Kingsolver
#10. School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
Barbara Kingsolver
#11. Several studies, including research done by Allison Byrum of the American Chemical Society, have shown fruits and vegetables grown without pesticides and herbicides to contain 50 to 60 percent more antioxidants than their sprayed counterparts.
Barbara Kingsolver
#12. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!
Barbara Kingsolver
#13. Motherhood is so sentimentalised and romanticised in our culture. It's practically against the law to say there are moments in the day when you hate your children. Everyone actually has those moments.
Barbara Kingsolver
#15. Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.
Barbara Kingsolver
#17. Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view.
Barbara Kingsolver
#18. The wonder to me now is that I thought my life worth saving ... 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.
Barbara Kingsolver
#19. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness.
Barbara Kingsolver
#20. Emelina and I took each other in. All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.
Barbara Kingsolver
#21. Somehow it had come to pass that this man was her whole world, and she had failed to take his measure.
Barbara Kingsolver
#23. And all of us with our closed eyes smelled the frangipani blossoms in the big rectangles of open wall, flowers so sweet they conjure up sin or heaven, depending on which way you are headed.
Barbara Kingsolver
#26. A life was a life. She'd been orphaned at an age to internalize death as poor material for a joke. And likewise, salvation.
Barbara Kingsolver
#27. There is not justice in this world. Father, forgive me wherever you are, but this world has brought one vile abomination after another down on the heads of the gentle, and I'll not live to see the meek inherit anything.
Barbara Kingsolver
#28. Nothing wondrous can come in this world unless it rests on the shoulders of kindness. He
Barbara Kingsolver
#29. some secrets kept themselves, out of a failure to stand up to the competing rumors. She
Barbara Kingsolver
#30. Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.
Barbara Kingsolver
#31. In our state - no kidding - they are called Standards of Learning, or "SOLs." (I don't think anyone intended the joke.)
Barbara Kingsolver
#32. Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can't persist much longer. If it does, then we won't.
Barbara Kingsolver
#34. I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.
Barbara Kingsolver
#35. Jazon and Mical. What kind of mother misspelled her kids' names on purpose?
Barbara Kingsolver
#37. 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
#38. Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.
Barbara Kingsolver
#39. Even the bells from the churches have a conversation, all ringing at once.
Barbara Kingsolver
#40. The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment's pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence.
Barbara Kingsolver
#41. My thoughts kept straying onto random paths ... hoping to get lost in a thicket.
Barbara Kingsolver
#42. 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
#43. Well, but it's criminal negligence, really. These kids have to grow up and run things. Larger things than a ball field, I mean. What kind of world will they really be able to make?
Barbara Kingsolver
#44. 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
#45. Soli, let me tell you. The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.
Barbara Kingsolver
#46. You can't know somebody, I thought, till you've followed him home.
Barbara Kingsolver
#47. We would not wake up from this nightmare to find out it was someone's real life, and for once that someone wasn't just a poor unlucky nobody in a shack you could forget about. It was our life, the only one we were going to have.
Barbara Kingsolver
#49. At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted.
Barbara Kingsolver
#50. she considered a language that could carry nothing but love and simple truth.
Barbara Kingsolver
#51. A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.
Barbara Kingsolver
#52. Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.
Barbara Kingsolver
#53. Modern US consumers now get to taste less than 1 percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago. Those old-timers now lurk only in backyard gardens and on farms that specialize in direct sales
if they survive at all. Many heirlooms have been lost entirely.
Barbara Kingsolver
#55. He doesn't even look at her because there is too much there, and he's afraid. She is his first child, his favorite, every mistake he ever made.
Barbara Kingsolver
#57. You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don't expect them to do a thing for you. They're far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven's name we will do next.
Barbara Kingsolver
#58. Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.
Barbara Kingsolver
#59. After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.
Barbara Kingsolver
#60. 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
#61. Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.
Barbara Kingsolver
#62. There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, There now, hang on, you'll get over it. Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer. Cynthia
Barbara Kingsolver
#63. Nobody had planted these flowers, I felt sure, nor harvested them either; these were works that the Lord had gone ahead and finished on His own. He must have lacked faith in mankind's follow-through capabilities, on the day he created flowers.
Barbara Kingsolver
#64. But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them.
Barbara Kingsolver
#65. Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.
Barbara Kingsolver
#66. You talk about her as if she is the Notre Dame Cathedral!" "She is. And the Statue of Liberty and Abbey Road and the best burrito of your life. Didn't you know?
Barbara Kingsolver
#67. Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.
Barbara Kingsolver
#69. You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own.
Barbara Kingsolver
#70. 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.
Barbara Kingsolver
#72. I had decided early on that if I couldn't dress elegant, I'd dress memorable.
Barbara Kingsolver
#73. 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
#74. Nothing was more wonderful than waiting for a happiness you could be sure of.
Barbara Kingsolver
#75. I'd forgotten how trees full of bird sounds made you sense the world differently: that life didn't just stop at eye level.
Barbara Kingsolver
#76. Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure. Why resist that?
Barbara Kingsolver
#77. Killing is a culturally loaded term, for most of us inextricably tied up with some version of a command that begins, "Thou shalt not." Every faith has it. And for all but perhaps the Jainists of India, that command is absolutely conditional. We know it does not refer to mosquitoes.
Barbara Kingsolver
#78. Do not expect God's protection in places beyond God's dominion. It will only make you feel punished. I'm warning you. When things go badly, you will blame yourself.
Barbara Kingsolver
#79. 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
#80. Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,' he said. 'We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.
Barbara Kingsolver
#81. I never learn anything from listening to myself (Ovid Byron, in Flight Behavior)
Barbara Kingsolver
#83. Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.
Barbara Kingsolver
#86. But being a stay-at-home mom was the loneliest kind of lonely, in which she was always and never by herself.
Barbara Kingsolver
#87. A million dead butterflies, she said. Sorry as hell they ever landed here.
Barbara Kingsolver
#88. A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.
Barbara Kingsolver
#89. The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go ... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
Barbara Kingsolver
#90. Where you'd be wearing out the knees of your trousers, sir, they just have to go ahead and wear out their knees!
Barbara Kingsolver
#91. That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don't know how a person could ever describe that scent.
Barbara Kingsolver
#92. You can't just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back.
Barbara Kingsolver
#93. That's how it is: some people are content to wait till you ask, while others jump right in with the whole story.
Barbara Kingsolver
#94. You think you're the foreigner here, and I'm the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that ... to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner, too.
Barbara Kingsolver
#96. Take one trip overland here and you'll know forever that a road in the jungle is a sweet, flat, impossible dream.
Barbara Kingsolver
#97. If you ask me, that's reason enough to keep a kitchen at the center of a family's life, as a place to understand favorite foods as processes, not just products.
Barbara Kingsolver
#98. 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 up like a mess of fish. Could this be true of civilized white Christians? In
Barbara Kingsolver
#99. Heroes may be less than heroic, while the common man saves the day.
Barbara Kingsolver
#100. Pay attention to your passions. They are the key to starting and finishing the book you are meant to write. I don't believe in talent. I believe in passion.
Barbara Kingsolver
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