Homeland and Other Stories Quotes

“Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland and Other Stories

“As I looked at her there among the pumpkins I was overcome with the color and the intesity of my life. In these moments we are driven to try and hoard happiness by taking photographs, but I know better. The improtant thing was what the colors stood for, the taste of hard apples and the existence of Lena and the exact quality of the sun on the last warm day in October. A photograph would have flattened the scene into a happy moment, whereas what I felt was rapture. The fleeting certainty that I deserved this space I'd been taking up on this earth, and all the air I had breathed.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland and Other Stories

“Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland and Other Stories

“It's frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets rough you fall back on whatever awful think you grew up with.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland and Other Stories

“Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland and Other Stories

“She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland and Other Stories

“Sometimes that happens. Children can be your heartache. But that doesn’t matter, you have to go on and have them,” she said. “It works out.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland: And Other Stories

“This will be Great Mam's last spring. Her last June apples. Her last fresh roasting ears from the garden.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland and Other Stories

“I loved the time spent with him, but felt in some other chamber of my heart that it was time wasted. That I ought to be doing something else while there was time.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland and Other Stories

“Over the phone, her laughter sounded like a warm bath.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland and Other Stories

“It's a relief to share the uncomplicated affection that has passed between people and their dogs for thousands of years.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland and Other Stories

“I don't know," Magda says, "Seems like that's just how it is with you and me. We're like islands on the moon.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland and Other Stories

“I don't know, Magda says. Seems like that's just how it is with you and me. We're like islands on the moon. There's no water on the moon, says Annemarie. That's what I mean. A person could walk from one to the other if they just decided to do it.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland and Other Stories

“Annemarie has always believed that if life had turned out better her mother would have been an artist. As it is, Magda just has to ooze out a little bit of art in everything she does, so that no part of her life is exactly normal.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland and Other Stories

“They called their refugee years The Time When We Were Not, and they were forgiven, because they had carried the truth of themselves in a sheltered place inside the flesh, exactly the way a fruit that has gone soft still carries inside itself the clean, hard stone of its future.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland: And Other Stories