Top 100 Kingsolver Quotes
#1. 'Lonesome Dove' by Larry McMurtry and 'The Poisonwood Bible' by Barbara Kingsolver have stuck with me throughout my life, and I think that says a lot about an author's writing.
Tess Gerritsen
#2. A tour of the Mexico City of Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo led by Barbara Kingsolver would be nice. And I certainly wouldn't turn down a tour of Johannes Vermeer's Delft led by Tracey Chevalier.
Cathy Marie Buchanan
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.
Barbara Kingsolver
#7. You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.
Barbara Kingsolver
#8. Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
Barbara Kingsolver
#10. When men want to kiss you they act like they are just on the brink of doing something that's going to change the whole wide world.
Barbara Kingsolver
#11. Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission, and it is treated with far less consideration.
Barbara Kingsolver
#12. My future was mapped in negatives. Next year, I could be anywhere but here.
Barbara Kingsolver
#13. What other man, ever again, would just do as she commanded, no questions asked? She felt overwhelmed with love and loss and nostalgia for this bond that was not even yet in her past,
Barbara Kingsolver
#14. Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.
Barbara Kingsolver
#15. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.
Barbara Kingsolver
#16. I felt emptied-out and singing with echoes, unrecognizable to myself: that particular feeling like your own house on the day you move out.
Barbara Kingsolver
#17. I asked Elsie how much food they needed from outside the community. 'Flour and sugar,' she said, and then thought a bit. 'Sometimes we'll buy pretzels as a splurge.'
It crossed my mind that the world's most efficient psychological evaluation would have just one question: Define splurge.
Barbara Kingsolver
#18. The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners
Barbara Kingsolver
#20. Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.
Barbara Kingsolver
#21. Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
Barbara Kingsolver
#22. Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea.
Barbara Kingsolver
#23. Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.
Barbara Kingsolver
#24. I've seen how you can't learn anything when you're trying to look like the smartest person in the room.
Barbara Kingsolver
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. One way of surviving heartache is to stay busy. Making something right in at least one tiny corner of the vast house of wrongs...
Barbara Kingsolver
#29. Sometimes history cleaves and for one helpless moment stands still like the pause when the ax splits a log and the two halves rest on end waiting to fall.
Barbara Kingsolver
#30. Oh, whatever would I do without my child-progeny sister to tell me what to do."
"Prodigy," I corrected.
Barbara Kingsolver
#31. We sang in church "Tata Nzolo"! Which means Father in Heaven or Father of Fish Bait depending on just how you sing it, and that pretty well summed up my quandry.
Barbara Kingsolver
#32. 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 happy farm picture on the package, and never be the wiser.
Barbara Kingsolver
#33. The better part of friendship might be holding one's tongue over the prospect of self-made wreckage.
Barbara Kingsolver
#36. 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
#38. It was his habit, when he rewrote anything, to shed himself of all earlier versions. He kept a clean house.
Barbara Kingsolver
#39. A blank space on a form, the missing page, a void, a hole in your knowledge of someone--it's still some real thing. It exists. You don't get to fill it in with whatever you want.
Barbara Kingsolver
#40. 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
#41. I could see that the whole idea and business of Childhood was nothing guaranteed. It seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown-up life like a frill on a dress.
Barbara Kingsolver
#42. The way I see it, a person isn't nothing more than a scarecrow ... The only difference between one that stands up good and one that blows over is what kind of a stick they're stuck up there on.
Barbara Kingsolver
#43. But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.
Barbara Kingsolver
#45. Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they're afraid to plant themselves?
Barbara Kingsolver
#46. On the day of the hunt I came to know in the slick center of my bones this one thing: all animals kill to survive, and we are animals.
Barbara Kingsolver
#47. He had a white beard and twinkly blue eyes, and all in all gave the impression of what Santa Claus would look like if he'd converted to Christian and gone without a good meal sine last Christmas.
Barbara Kingsolver
#48. I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.
Barbara Kingsolver
#49. Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.
Barbara Kingsolver
#50. 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
#51. We're surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.
Barbara Kingsolver
#53. Outside in the sun the Holy Mother stood on her pedestal in the garden, sorry but unsympathetic. The usual position of mothers.
Barbara Kingsolver
#54. In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.
Barbara Kingsolver
#55. 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
#56. I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.
Barbara Kingsolver
#57. I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.
Barbara Kingsolver
#58. Mi'ija, in a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can.
Barbara Kingsolver
#59. The sloped desert plain that lay between us and the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds.
Barbara Kingsolver
#60. In my opinion, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from a greaty height.
Barbara Kingsolver
#61. Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise.
Barbara Kingsolver
#62. I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.
Barbara Kingsolver
#63. I'm always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves.
Barbara Kingsolver
#65. What a rich wisdom it would be, and how much more bountiful a harvest, to gain pleasure not from achieving personal perfection but from understanding the inevitability of imperfection and pardoning those who also fall short of it.
Barbara Kingsolver
#68. Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.
Barbara Kingsolver
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.
Barbara Kingsolver
#72. The blossom of our family, like one of those miraculous fruit tress that taps into an invisible vein of nurture and bears radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on living.
Barbara Kingsolver
#73. Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.
Barbara Kingsolver
#74. The last generations's worst fears become the next one's B-grade entertainment.
Barbara Kingsolver
#75. High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.
Barbara Kingsolver
#76. She watched the dark highway and entertained me with her vegetable-soup song, except that now there were people mixed in with the beans and potatoes: Dwayne Ray, Mattie, Esperanza, Lou Ann and all the rest.
And me. I was the main ingredient.
Barbara Kingsolver
#77. The giant beech next door intends to shiver off every hair of its pelt.
Barbara Kingsolver
#78. Finally Cub said, "They don't call it global weirding."
"I know. But I think that's actually the idea."
Cub shook his head. "Weather is the Lord's business.
Barbara Kingsolver
#80. Let's go take a walk down to the blue hole. You need to look at some water.
Barbara Kingsolver
#81. A novel has to entertain
that's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page.
Barbara Kingsolver
#82. I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them ...
Barbara Kingsolver
#83. The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.
Barbara Kingsolver
#84. Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.
Barbara Kingsolver
#85. School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
Barbara Kingsolver
#86. Scientific illiteracy in our populations is leaving too many of us unprepared to discuss or understand much of the damage we are wreaking on our atmosphere, our habitat, and even the food that enters our mouths.
Barbara Kingsolver
#90. You can't replace people you love with other people ... But you can trust that you're not going to run out of people to love.
Barbara Kingsolver
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. I hold on to my adopted shore, chanting private vows: wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need. Let me be a good animal today. Let me dance in the waves of my private tide, the habits of survival and love.
Barbara Kingsolver
#94. 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
#96. If you look hard enough you can always see reasons, but you'll go crazy if you think it's all punishment for your sins.
Barbara Kingsolver
#97. Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.
Barbara Kingsolver
#98. 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
#99. Words were not just words, describing things a person could see. Even if most did not. Maybe they had to know a thing first, to see it.
Barbara Kingsolver
#100. The end was always curled up there between us, like a sleeping cat, present even in our love-making.
Barbara Kingsolver
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
