"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)

"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)

"Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place. "
— 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

"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

"The changes we dread most may contain our salvation."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Small Wonder: Essays)

"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)

"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: A Year of Food Life)

"It's what you do that makes your soul."
— Barbara Kingsolver

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

"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: A Year of Food Life)

"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'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)

"Morning always comes."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"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)

"The truth needs so little rehearsal."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"A mother's body remembers her babies..."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin. "
— Barbara Kingsolver

"Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.
"
— Barbara Kingsolver (Pigs in Heaven)

"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)

"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

"Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"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)

"'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.'"
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)

"Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)

"When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they are missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"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)

"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)

"I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint, stirring breeze. The scent trail shifts, causing the predator to miss the pounce. One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires." "
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"Love weighs nothing."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"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

"Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)

" “Tortolita, let me tell you a story,” Estevan said. “This is a South American, wild Indian story about heaven and hell.” Mrs. Parsons made a prudish face, and Estevan went on. “If you go visit hell, you will see a room like this kitchen. There is a pot of delicious stew on the table, with the most delicate aroma you can imagine. All around, people sit, like us. Only they are dying of starvation. They are jibbering and jabbering,” he looked extra hard at Mrs. Parsons, “but they cannot get a bit of this wonderful stew God has made for them. Now, why is that?”
“Because they’re choking? For all eternity?” Lou Ann asked. Hell, for Lou Ann, would naturally be a place filled with sharp objects and small round foods.
“No,” he said. “Good guess, but no. They are starving because they only have spoons with very long handles. As long as that.” He pointed to the mop, which I had forgotten to put away. “With these ridiculous, terrible spoons, the people in hell can reach into the pot but they cannot put the food in their mouths. Oh, how hungry they are! Oh, how they swear and curse each other!” he said, looking again at Virgie. He was enjoying this.
“Now,” he went on, “you can go and visit heaven. What? You see a room just like the first one, the same table, the same pot of stew, the same spoons as long as a sponge mop. But these people are all happy and fat.”
“Real fat, or do you mean just well-fed?” Lou Ann asked.
“Just well-fed,” he said. “Perfectly, magnificently well-fed, and very happy. Why do you think?”
He pinched up a chunk of pineapple in his chopsticks, neat as you please, and reached all the way across the table to offer it to Turtle. She took it like a newborn bird."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Bean Trees)

"No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

""Cooking without remuneration" and "slaving over a hot stove" are activities separated mostly by a frame of mind. The distinction is crucial. Career women in many countries still routinely apply passion to their cooking, heading straight from work to the market to search out the freshest ingredients, feeding their loved ones with aplomb. [...] Full-time homemaking may not be an option for those of us delivered without trust funds into the modern era. But approaching mealtimes as a creative opportunity, rather than a chore, is an option. Required participation from spouse and kids is an element of the equation. An obsession with spotless collars, ironing, and kitchen floors you can eat off of---not so much. We've earned the right to forget about stupefying household busywork. But kitchens where food is cooked and eaten, those were really a good idea. We threw that baby out with the bathwater. It may be advisable to grab her by her slippery foot and haul her back in here before it's too late."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"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

"A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"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)

"I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

"The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)