Animal Dreams 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

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

“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, Animal Dreams

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“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. 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 destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. Right now I'm living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“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 screaming into the woods?”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“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

“To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity *after* their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it's the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“What keeps you going isn't just some fine destination but the road you're on and the fact you know how to drive.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“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, Animal Dreams

“Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work--that goes on, and it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children's bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don't get lost.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

“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.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams