Prodigal Summer Quotes

“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, Prodigal Summer

“How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

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

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

“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

“I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he is not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“I've always found people love you best if you can laugh at your own foolish misfortunes and keep mum about everyone else's”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“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

“she's never forgotten, either, how a mystery caught in the hand could lose its grace”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“Feminine' was a test like some witch trial she was preordained to fail.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“A bird in the hand loses its mystery in no time flat.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“she considered a language that could carry nothing but love and simple truth.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“His scent burst onto her brain like a rain of lights, causing her to know him perfectly. This is how moths speak to each other. The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“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.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“From what he could see she had the legs of a much younger woman. Certainly not what he would have expected in the way of Unitarian legs.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“Lusa turned to Crys, her eyes shining. "That was a luna."
Crys shrugged. "So?"
"So? So what? You want it should sing, too?”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“Every family's its own trip to China.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“She laid the side of her face against his frail old heart, where the pink shell of her ear could capture whatever song it had left.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“I will never understand it,” she said. “We’re the top of our food chain, so you’d think we’d relate to those guys the best. Seems like we’d be trying to talk them into trade agreements.” Eddie laughed at that. “So you’re telling me that as a kid, you were rooting for the wolf to eat the Riding Hood babe?” “My last name was Wolfe. I took it all kind of personally.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“And you came over to make sure I was all right, is that what you're telling me? You came over here with your shotgun to protect me from my scarecrow?"

"I had to," Garnett said, spreading his hands, throwing himself on her mercy. "I didn't care for the way Buddy was looking at you in your short pants.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“Don’t you miss it, any of it?'
…

'I couldn’t say.' She thought about it. 'Not cars or electric lights, not movies. Books I can get if I ask. But walking around in a library, putting my hands on books I never knew about, that I miss. Any thing else, I don’t know.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“The spiraling flights of moths appear haphazard only because of the mechanisms of olfactory tracking are so different from our own. Using binocular vision, we judge the location of an object by comparing the images from two eyes and tracking directly toward the stimulus. But for species relying on the sense of smell, the organism compares points in space, moves in the direction of the greater concentration, then compares two more points successively, moving in zigzags toward the source. Using olfactory navigation the moth detects currents of scent in the air and, by small increments, discovers how to move upstream.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“One of the skills of grief that Lusa had learned was to hold on tight to the last moments between sleep and waking. Sometimes, then, in the early morning, taking care not to open her eyes or rouse her mind through its warm drowse to the surface where pain broke clear and could, she found she could choose her dreams.

She could call a memory and patiently follow it backward into flesh, sound, and scents. It would be come her life once again and she was held and safe. Everything undecided. Everything still new.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“How would you even begin to make a hush puppy, what in the world was in one? Nothing to do with a puppy, surely. Garnett had long known, though he didn’t much like to admit it, that God’s world and the better part of daily life were full of mysteries known only to women.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“You knew me well enough to find me here,' she said.
And his scent burst onto her brain like a rain of lights, and his voice reached across the distance without words: 'I've always known you that well.'
He wrapped her in his softness, touched her face with the movement of trees and the odor of wild water over stones, dissolving her need in the confidence of his embrace.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

“Since you asked, yes, I do believe humankind holds a special place in the world. It’s the same place held by a mockingbird, in his opinion, and a salamander in whatever he has that resembles a mind of his own. Every creature alive believes this: The center of everything is me. Every life has its own kind of worship, I think, but do you think a salamander is worshiping some God that looks like a big two-legged man? Go on! To him, a man’s a shadowy nuisance (if anything) compared to the sacred business of finding food and a mate and making progeny to rule the mud for all times. To themselves and one another, those muddly little salamander lives mean everything.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer