Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

In Bobby Ogle's version of heaven everyone would wind up in one place, criminals and Muslims include...

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do i...

Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or...

They said it was to be a revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants’ rooms because the...

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they t...

Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave. I...

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

You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. Ho...

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and th...

The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who sta...

In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combina...

People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.

But I'll tell you a secret. When I want to take God at his word exactly I take a peep out the window...

...The question is, why do you think you can't be a writer?""To be a writer, you need readers.""I'm ...

Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 p...

She watched the dark highway and entertained me with her vegetable-soup song, except that now there ...

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.

The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervi...

People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits wil...

It's what you do that makes your soul not the other way around.

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

It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll b...

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that g...

People ask without wanting to know.

So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and th...

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the...

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war...

Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste while others deliberate between damp dir...

You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It's what these guys have decided to call America. ...

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her no...

My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it's because my hea...

If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do i...

A novel works it's magic by putting a reader inside another person's life. The pace is as slow as li...

He lifts her breasts, which fit perfectly into his hands, though he knows this is no promise that he...

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you mi...

This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't co...

Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully ...

A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.

I looked hard out the window and understood suddenly that what I saw was full of color. A watercolor...

There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physi...

You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to run o...

What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness.

Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eterni...

What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.

Pay attention to your dreams; when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then aft...

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

The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is l...

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do i...

Those first few weeks are an unearthly season. From the outside you remain so ordinary, no one can t...

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

The tunnel of winter had settled over our lives, ushered in by that great official Hoodwink, the end...

Our holiday food splurge was a small crate of tangerines, which we found ridiculously thrilling afte...

Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser tha...

The longer I think about a food industry organized around an animal that cannot reproduce itself wit...

This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.

And here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry fig...

For about 48 weeks of the year an asparagus plant is unrecognizable to anyone except an asparagus gr...

Each food items in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles....If every U.S. citiz...

I asked Elsie how much food they needed from outside the community. 'Flour and sugar,' she said, and...

She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-f...

Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don't tell you ...

Spring is made of solid, fourteen-karat gratitude, the reward for the long wait. Every religious tra...

Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind of all one. You know what Hester to...

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

...whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about thes...

...animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.

Some of life's greatest calls were answered not by the head but by the body.

Well, yeah," Dovey said. "That's America. We watch shows about rich people's houses and their design...

There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with...

Now, see, that's why everybody wants Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Sc...

A journalist's job is to collect information," Ovid said to Pete. "Nope," Pete said. "That's what we...

I never learn anything from listening to myself.

I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff t...

Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,' he said. 'We fetishize it, really. Our retireme...

For scientists, reality is not optional.

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

When something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name an...

In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look...

Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.

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

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

Last time I talked to her she didn't sound like herself. She's depressed. It's awful what happens wh...

She has changed in this way that motherhood changes you, so that you forget you ever had time for sm...

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the mor...

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could ...

I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But ...

Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impa...

Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot.

I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tr...

Sometimes I've survived anger only one minute at a time, by saying to myself again and again that th...

To stomp about the world ignoring cultural differences is arrogant, to be sure, but perhaps there is...

But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessn...

Eating is a genuine need, continuous from our first day to our last, amounting over time to our most...

As a dinner guest I gratefully eat just about anything that's set before me, because graciousness am...

What a rich wisdom it would be, and how much more bountiful a harvest, to gain pleasure not from ach...