Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

A novel works it's magic by putting a reader inside another person's life. The pace is as slow as life. It's as detailed as life. It requires you, the reader, to fill in an outline of words with vivid pictures drawn subconsciously from your own life, so that the story feels more personal than the sets designed by someone else and handed over via TV or movies. Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up. It's why you might find yourself crying, even if you aren't the crying kind.

I try to be open-minded. And yet this food writer has less sense than God gave a goose about where food comes from. I'd worked on our relationship, moving through the stages of bafflement, denial, and asking this guy out loud, Where do you live, the moon?

There must be limits, somewhere, to the human footprint on this earth. When the whole of the world is reduced to nothing but human product, we will have lost the map that can show us how we got here, and can offer our spirits an answer when we ask why. Surely we are capable of declaring sacred some quarters that we dare not enter or possess.

The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.

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.

When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine.
Pigs in Heaven

Which makes you wonder, are they really speaking real words or do little kids just start out naturally understanding each other before the prime of life sets in?

The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.

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.

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.

In the first hour of dawn, just as the hem of the sky began to whiten.

Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.

Mexico admits you through an arched stone orifice into the tree-filled courtyard of its heart, where a dog pisses against a wall and a waiter hustles through a curtain of jasmine to bring a bowl of tortilla soup, steaming with cilantro and lime. Cats stalk lizards among the clay pots around the fountain, doves settle into the flowering vines and coo their prayers, thankful for the existence of lizards. The potted plants silently exhale, outgrowing their clay pots. Like Mexico's children they stand pinched and patient in last year's too-small shoes.

A meaningless phrase repeated again and again begins to resemble truth.

I took my time exploring. I savored the first minutes in a new home. Carlos would always go straight to unpacking boxes, looking for the sheets and coffeepot and swearing that we were going to get better organized, while I stepped stealthily over the bare floors, peeking around corners and into alluring doors, which generally turned out to be the broom closet. But there was that thrilling sense that, like a new lover, the place held attributes I had yet to discover. My favorite book as a child was _The Secret Garden_. It's embarrassing to think I'd merrily relocated again and again, accompanying Carlos to the ends of the earth, because of the lure of a possible garret or secret closet. But it might be true.

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.

If it crosses your mind that water running through hundreds of miles of open ditch in a desert will evaporate and end up full of concentrated salts and muck, then let me just tell you, that kind of negative thinking will never get you elected to public office in the state of Arizona. When this giant new tap turned on, developers drew up plans to roll pink stucco subdivisions across the desert in all directions. The rest of us were supposed to rejoice as the new flow rushed into our pipes, even as the city warned us this water was kind of special. They said it was okay to drink but don't put it in an aquarium because it would kill the fish.
Drink it we did, then, filled our coffee makers too, and mixed our children's juice concentrate with fluid that would gag a guppy. Oh, America the Beautiful, where are our standards?

His mustache made two curved lines around the sides of his mouth like parentheses, as if everything he might say would be very quiet, and incidental.

Eyes can pierce a skull.

Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.

You can't save the whales by eating whales, but paradoxically, you can help save rare, domesticated foods by eating them. They're kept alive by gardeners who have a taste for them, and farmers who know they'll be able to sell them. The consumer becomes a link in this conservation chain by seeking out the places where heirloom vegetables are sold, taking them home, whacking them up with knives, and learning to incorporate their exceptional tastes into personal and family expectations.

It's a selfish habit. I never learn anything from listening to myself.

Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don't respect his work?

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.

Over the phone, her laughter sounded like a warm bath.

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.

Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin, see it in your mind's eye and smell it with your mind's nose! But forming these images from the printed page is a skill you have to develop when you're fairly young, I think, or else it's very difficult to read for pleasure later on.

Sept 15 1930 at the independence festival of the school of cretins ... At the head of the table by the bowl of pomegranates, Senora Bartolome had put a note: Take only one, our Lord Jesus is watching!.
A second note appeared at the foot of the table beside the sugared almonds: Take all you want, Jesus is looking at the pomegranates.

Don't dare presume there's shame in the lot of a woman who carries on.

I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living.

Christmas music fills our ears with tales of a Palestinian miracle birth, a generous Turkish saint whom the Dutch dressed in a red suit, and a Druid ceremonial tree ... I

I didn't study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters.

Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.

If a friend had a coronary scare and finally started exercising three days a week, who would hound him about the other four days? It's the worst of bad manners - and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society - to ridicule the small gesture.

She would die of him or be cured.

According to Indian crop ecologist Vandana Shiva, humans have eaten some 80,000 plant species in our history. After recent precipitous changes, three-quarters of all human food now comes from just eight species, with the field quickly narrowing down to genetically modified corn, soy, and canola. If woodpeckers and pandas enjoy celebrity status on the endangered-species list (dubious though such fame may be), food crops are the forgotten commoners. We're losing them as fast as we're losing rain forests. An enormous factor in this loss has been the new idea of plant varieties as patentable properties, rather than God's gifts to humanity or whatever the arrangement was previously felt to be, for all of prior history.

For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.

The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earring on sad, rich widows

This will be Great Mam's last spring. Her last June apples. Her last fresh roasting ears from the garden.

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

You could allow a gentleman the privacy of his piss.

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.

The rule of fishes is the same as the rule of people: if the shark comes, they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten. They share a single jumpy heart that drives them to move all together, running away from danger just before it arrives. Somehow they know. Underneath

Children model the behavior of adults, on whatever scale is available to them. Ours are growing up in a nation whose most important, influential men - from presidents to the coolest film characters - solve problems by killing people ... We have taught our children in a thousand ways, sometimes with flag-waving and sometimes with a laugh track, that the bad guy deserves to die.

Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.

Was this what they meant by hot flashes? But they didn't feel hot. Her body felt full and heavy and slow and human and absent somehow, just a weight to be carried forward without its enthusiastic cycles of fertility and rest, the crests and valleys she had never realized she counted on so much. Dead weight? Was that what she was now; an obsolete female biding its time until death?

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

If I had to give up my life for anything, it would have to have the resilience of hope, the elation of new literacy, the brilliant life of a field of flowers, the elementary kindness of bread. Nothing short of that. It would have to be something as sure as love.

How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.

The houses all seemed a little senile, with arthritc hinges and window screens hanging at embarrassing angles.

We cannot jump to conclusions. All we can do is measure and count. That is the task of science.

But this boy in a French or British factory, standing in his leather overall welding the casing on a metal bomb; what can he see? That thing will fly through the air, fall hundreds of miles away, and kill boys in leather overalls in a German factory. the reports will roar victory or defeat, and boys will never know how alike their lives have been.

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.

It made no sense, a lifespan of a few weeks did not add up to an annual migration of many thousand miles. How did they learn where to go?

He crossed his arms over the chair back and smirked his disapproval at Brother Fowles. "Sir, I offer you my condolences. Personally I've never been troubled by any such difficulties with interpreting God's word." "Indeed, I see that," Brother Fowles said.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which ... is at home at the moment.

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.

In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again(15).

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.

Doesn't the Federal Farm bill help out all these poor farmers?
No. It used to, but ever since its inception just after the Depression, the Federal Farm Bill has slowly been altered by agribusiness lobbyists. It is now largely corporate welfare ... It is this, rather than any improved efficiency or productiveness, that has allowed corporations to take over farming in the United States, leaving fewer than a third of our farms still run by families.
But those family-owned farms are the ones more likely to use sustainable techniques, protect the surrounding environment, maintain green spaces, use crop rotations and management for pest and weed controls, and apply fewer chemicals. In other words, they're doing exactly what 80 percent of U.S. consumers say we would prefer to support, while our tax dollars do the opposite.

Entomologist Dr. Ovid Byron speaking to television journalist, Tina, who says, re. global warming, "Scientists of course are in disagreement about whether this is happening and whether humans have a role."
He replies:
"The Arctic is genuinely collapsing. Scientists used to call these things the canary in the mine. What they say now is, The canary is dead. We are at the top of Niagara Falls, Tina, in a canoe. There is an image for your viewers. We got here by drifting, but we cannot turn around for a lazy paddle back when you finally stop pissing around. We have arrived at the point of an audible roar. Does it strike you as a good time to debate the existence of the falls?" p.367

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.

Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you're contagious.

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.

She married him two years ago for love, or so she thought, and he's a good enough man but a devotee of household silence. His idea of marriage is to spray WD-40 on anything that squeaks ... The quiet only subsides when Harland sleeps and his tonsils make up for lost time.

Let's go take a walk down to the blue hole. You need to look at some water.

I felt the breath of God go cold against my skin.

Food transport has become a bizarre and profitable economic equation that's no longer really about feeding anyone: in our own nation we export 1.1 million tons of potatoes, while we also import 1.4 million tons.

Patriotism threatens free speech with death. It is infuriated by thoughtful hesitation, constructive criticism of our leaders and pleas for peace. It despises people of foreign birth. It has specifically blamed homosexuals, feminists and the American Civil Liberties Union. In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder. Whom are we calling terrorists here?

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

They rock against each other, holding on, and the birds in the forest raise their voices to drown out the secret of creation.

Wardrobe of Denial. Blanchie glanced

It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant's afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it's been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences.

But a spontaneous traveler inevitably will end up with the tummy gauge suddenly on empty, in some place where cuisine is not really the point: a museum cafeteria, or late-night snack bar across from the concert hall. Eating establishments where cuisine isn't the point - is that a strange notion?

Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.

Whatever it is, you can live through it, and it ends.

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

The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, 'We already did. We have made the world new.' The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on.

The human person cannot face up to a bad outcome, that's just the deal.

Pay attention to your dreams; when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness.

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.

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

Each food items in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles ... If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.

He had senile dementia and liked to go outside naked, but he could still do two things perfectly: win at checkers and write out prescriptions.

Daddy and I got married kind of accidentally.

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

Michael Pollan: "The industrialization--and dehumanization--of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do."
U.S. consumers may take our pick of reasons to be wary of the resulting product: growth hormones, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, unhealthy cholesterol composition, deadly E. coli strains, fuel consumption, concentration of manure into toxic waste lagoons, and the turpitude of keeping confined creatures at the limits of their physiological and psychological endurance.

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.

Dellarobia watched the void of this man where once there had been wonder, and she despaired of her future. In such a short time he had relieved her of a lifetime of illusions, and already she missed them.

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.

Move on. Walk forward into the light.

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.

Her name, he says like the Lord's taken in vain. Sometimes he says "Mexico," and the word has nothing in it at all. A wall with no colors painted on it.

Our plans are small and somewhat absurd.

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.

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.

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

Planning complex, beautiful meals and investing one's heart and time in their preparation is the opposite of self-indulgence. Kitchen-based family gatherings are process-oriented, cooperative, and in the best of worlds, nourishing and soulful. A lot of calories get used up before anyone sits down to consume. But more importantly, a lot of talk happens first, news exchanged, secrets revealed across generations, paths cleared with a touch on the arm. I have given and received some of my life's most important hugs with those big oven-mitt potholders on both hands.

There will never be another Frida.

Ah, the mysterious croak. Here today, gone tomorrow. It's the best reason I can think of to throw open the blinds and risk belief. Right now, this minute, time to move out into the grief and glory. High tide.