quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

"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)

"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)

"God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves. "
— Barbara Kingsolver

"Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place. "
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

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

"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

"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)

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

"The truth needs so little rehearsal."
— 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)

"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)

"Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals."
— 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

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

"I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing ever crack in my soul could be chinked with a book."
— Barbara Kingsolver

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

"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)

"A mother's body remembers her babies..."
— 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)

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

"'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)

"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)

"This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

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

"Love weighs nothing."
— Barbara Kingsolver

"The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes."
— 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 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)

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

"Sometimes I still have American dreams. I mean literally. I see microwave ovens and exercise machines and grocery store shelves with 30 brands of shampoo, and I look at these things oddly, in my dream. I stand and think, "What is all this for? What is the hunger that drives this need?" I think it's fear. Codi, I hope you won't be hurt by this, but I don't think I'll ever be going back. I don't think I can."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)

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

"The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep. "
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)

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

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

"A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Prodigal Summer: A Novel)

""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

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

"Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"But still, I’d be darned if I was going to be one of those Americans who stomp around Italy barking commands in ever-louder English. I was going to be one of those Americans who traversed Italy with my forehead knit in concentration, divining wordsw from their Latin roots and answering by wedging French cognates into Italian pronunciations spliced onto a standard Spanish verb conjugation."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners"
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)

"Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage."
— Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)

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

"Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history... Listen being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger."
— Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)