Kingsolver Quotes

Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves. ~ 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

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I have long relied on the comforts of martyrdom. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

That's a tarantula,' he said. 'You got to watch out for them suckers. They can jump four feet. If they get you, you go crazy. It's a special kind of poison'
This I didn't believe. I never could figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a big dangerous deal. I mean, we've got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don't we? ~ Barbara Kingsolver

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. That's not gallons, but barrels. Small changes in buying habits can make big differences. Becoming a less energy-dependent nation may just need to start with a good breakfast. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

We must surely appear to the world as exactly what we are: a nation that organizes its economy around consuming twice as much oil as it produces, and around the profligate wastefulness of the wars and campaigns required to defend such consumption. In recent years we have defined our national interest largely in terms of the oil fields and pipelines we need to procure fuel. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

You're thinking of revolution as a great all-or-nothing. I think of it as one more morning in a muggy cotton field, checking the undersides of leaves to see what's been there, figuring out what to do that won't clear a path for worse problems next week. Right now that's what I do. You ask why I'm not afraid of loving and losing, and that's my answer. Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work--that goes on, it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children's bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don't get lost.
Codi, here's what I've decided: the very least you can do in you life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyer nor the destroyed. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

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

She would die of him or be cured. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

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

What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

They couldn't close out the whole world, maybe, but they could sure find something on their TV or radio to put scientists or foreigners or whatever they thought he was in a bad light. Truly, they were no better than the city people always looking down on southerners ... If people played their channels right, they could be spared from disagreement for the length of their natural lives. Finally she got it. The need for so many channels. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

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). ~ Barbara Kingsolver

So he just stood there brewing like a coffeepot. Onlywith a coffeepot you know exactly what's going to come out of it. ~ 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

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

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

I've always seen the world through the eyes of a scientist. I love the predictable outcomes that science gives us, the control over the world that that can render. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Morning always comes. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I prefer to remain anomalous. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

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. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

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? ~ Barbara Kingsolver

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

There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Sorry to tell you, but that's a very old chestnut. My mother used to say when God slams a door on you, he opens a window.'

Tig gave this two seconds of respectful consideration before rejecting it. 'No, that's not the same. I'm saying when God slams a door on you it's probably a shitstorm. You're going to end up in rubble. But it's okay because without all that crap overhead, you're standing in the daylight.'

'Without a roof over your head, it kind of feels like you might die.'

'Yeah, but you might not. For sure you won't find your way out of the mess if you keep picking up bricks and stuffing them in your pockets. What you have to do is look for blue sky. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Art is the antidote that can call us back from the edge of numbness, restoring the ability to feel for another. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

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

Mother could go for one year without food, but not one day without her lip sticks. ~ 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

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

I am like God, Codi? Like GOD? Give me a break. If I get another letter that mentions SAVING THE WORLD, I am sending you, by return mail, a letter bomb. Codi, please. I've got things to do.

You say you're not a moral person. What a copout. Sometime, when I wasn't looking, something happened to make you think you were bad. What, did Miss Colder give you a bad mark on your report card? 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.

I'm sorry to be blunt. I've had a bad week. I am trying to explain, and I wish you were here so I could tell you this right now, I am trying to explain to you that I'm not here to save anybody or any thing. It's not some perfect ideal we're working toward that keeps us going. You ask, what if we lose this war? Well, we could. By invasion, or even in the next election. People are very tired. I don't expect to see perfection before I die. Lord, if I did I would have stuck my head in the oven back in Tucson, after hearing the stories of some of those refugees. What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, "What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off ~ Barbara Kingsolver

When push comes to shove, a mother takes care of her children from the bottom up. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night. ~ 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

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

I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

A meaningless phrase repeated again and again begins to resemble truth. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

If you never stepped on anybody's toes, you never been for a walk. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

No kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

It's frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets rough you fall back on whatever awful think you grew up with. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

If you can't dress expensive, dress memorable. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Our plans are small and somewhat absurd. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

A novel can educate to some extent, but first 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. I have a commitment to accessibility. I believe in plot. I want an English professor to understand the symbolism while at the same time I want the people I grew up with - who may not often read anything but the Sears catalog - to read my books. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

It was hard to feel the remotest sympathy for any of the different fools she'd been. As opposed to the fool she was being now. People hang on to that one, she thought: the fool they are right now. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

The truth needs so little rehearsal. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Jesus was a more reliable backer, evidently, less likely to drink himself unconscious or get liver cancer. No wonder people chose Him as their number-one friend. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Sometimes the past can vanish. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

The first sentence of a book is a promise. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

A territory is only possessed for a moment in time. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Alice hands Annawake a handkerchief. Young people never carry them, she's noticed. They haven't yet learned that heartbreak can catch up to you on any given day. p. 285 ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Whatever you want the most, it's going to be the worst for you. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Cat, this is America, they let anybody vote. Crooks, wigs, even cookies like us. Dogs and cats, probably. Don't take Fido to the polls, he might cancel you out. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

A sound-bite culture can't discuss science very well. Exactly what we're losing when we reduce biodiversity, the causes and consequences of global warming-these traumas can't be adequately summarized in an evening news wrap-up. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I don't look like who I am. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

The best artifact was the calendar of the ancients, a great carved piece of stone as big as a kitchen, circular, bolted to the wall like a giant clock. In the center was an angry face looking out, as if he'd come through that stone from some other place to have a look at us, and not very pleased about it. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

The room looks as if a giant dog after a large lunch of food, socks, paints, trousers and pencils, walked into that room and vomited everywhere. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

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

Everyone wants the tallest tree to fall ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Or the quaking misgivings that infected every step forward, after a loss. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

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 ~ Barbara Kingsolver

This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers with heavy heads. You can shield them with your body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but they'll still move toward him. Without cease they'll bend to his light. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

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

And you came over to make sure I was all right, is that what you're telling me? You cam over here with your shotgun to protect me from my scarecrow?"
"I had to," Garnett said, spreading his hands, throwing himself on her mercy. " I didn't care for the way Buddy was looking at you in your short pants. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

The longer you live, the more likely you are to have something to say. ~ 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

It's interesting that penny-pinching is an accepted defense for toxic food habits, when frugality so rarely rules other consumer domains. The majority of Americans buy bottled drinking water, for example, even though water runs from the faucets at home for a fraction of the cost, and government quality standards are stricter for tap water than for bottled. At any income level, we can be relied upon for categorically unnecessary purchases: portable-earplug music instead of the radio; extra-fast Internet for leisure use; heavy vehicles to transport light loads; name-brand clothing instead of plainer gear. "Economizing," as applied to clothing, generally means looking for discount name brands instead of wearing last year's clothes again. The dread of rearing unfashionable children is understandable. But as a priority, "makes me look cool" has passed up "keeps arteries functional" and left the kids huffing and puffing (fashionably) in the dust. ~ 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

This is what it means to be very slow: every story you would like to tell has already ended before you can open your mouth. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

At some point in the evening Dellarobia had stopped being amazed that Ovid had turned into someone new, and understood he had become himself, in the presence of his wife. With the sense of a great weight settling, she recognized marriage. Not the precarious risk she's balanced for years against forbidden fruits, something easily lost in a brittle moment by flying away or jumping a train to ride off on someone else's steam. She was not about to lose it. She'd never had it. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Today was the day. Every day was the day. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Children - even when they have endured the unthinkable - have a gift for divining the moment when the grown-ups really need to lighten up. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included. ~ 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

The novel is inherently a political instrument, regardless of its subject. It invites you - more than invites you, induces you - to live inside another person's skin. It creates empathy. And that's the antidote to bigotry. The novel doesn't just tell you about another life, which is what a newspaper would do. It makes you live another life, inhabit another perspective. And that's very important. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn't. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

[on her Amish friends]I do know this family has borne losses and grief, just like the rest of us. But if they are generally content, must such a life inevitably be dismissed as mythical, or else merely quaint? ... It sounds like a community type that went extinct a generation ago. But it didn't, not completely. If a self-sufficient farming community has survived here, it remains a possibility elsewhere. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

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. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

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

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

Zeke embodied the contradiction of his generation: jaded about the fate of the world, idealistic about personal prospects. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

They all attended Hester's church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

For scientists, reality is not optional. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

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

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

The war's [World War II] end has left America with loads of get-up-and-go, and no place to go. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

She would just be catching up when I'd go again, swimming farther out into life because I still hadn't found a rock to stand on. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Were the beaux less generous over time? Her assets less marketable? If she had lived to be old, would she have resided in a teacup, to be sipped at intervals beneath some gray moustache? ~ Barbara Kingsolver

In summer a young rooster's fancy turns to ... how can I say this delicately? The most ham-fisted attempts at courtship I've ever had to watch. (And yes, I'm including high school.) ~ Barbara Kingsolver

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

Today at the Melchor market, a fantastical sight. A servant girl with a birdcage on her back, full of birds. She wore her blue shawl wrapped around the cage and tied in front to hold it. The willow cage must have been very light because she was not bent over, yet it towered over her head, with turrets like a Japanese pagoda. And full of birds: green and yellow, flapping about like dreams trying to escape from a skull. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

This was a living flow, like a pulse through veins, with the cells bursting and renewing themselves as they went. The sudden vision filled her with strong emotions that embarrassed her, for fear of breaking into sobs as she had in front of her in-laws that day when the butterflies enveloped her. How was that even normal, to cry over insects? ~ Barbara Kingsolver