Barbara Kingsolver > Quotes

“The very least you can do in your life is 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.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

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

“Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“There is no point 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.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees

“Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place. ”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“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

“What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder

“April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant (among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can't keep, all passion is really a setup, and we're doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and would further add: Who cares? Every spring I go out there anyway, around the bend, unconditionally. ... Come the end of the dark days, I am more than joyful. I'm nuts. ”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“It's what you do that makes your soul.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“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 screaming into the woods?”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“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

“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, Animal Dreams

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

“Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.”
― 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, The Bean Trees

“In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees

“A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it. ”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

“Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“The truth needs so little rehearsal.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, so people imagine a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had.

But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna

“If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me. ”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“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, The Poisonwood Bible

“Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“Morning always comes.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“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.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Pigs In Heaven

“If you never stepped on anybody's toes, you never been for a walk.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“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.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Love weighs nothing.”
― Barbara Kingsolver

“I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.”
― Barbara Kingsolver