Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

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

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

What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.

~ 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

To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

What a rich wisdom it would be, and how much more bountiful a harvest, to gain pleasure not from achieving personal perfection but from understanding the inevitability of imperfection and pardoning those who also fall short of it.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

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.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.

~ 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

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

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

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

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

Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'Not at this address'. Just keep looking for the right address.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

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

~ Barbara Kingsolver

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which... is at home at the moment.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

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

So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.' Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even more so. them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance.'In balance.'.'And what is the deal?' I asked.We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests.'Like a note you'd send somebody after you stayed in their house?'Exactly like that. 'Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn't your favorite one.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

A territory is only possessed for a moment in time.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

If the Lord hasn't got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that's his business.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Science doesn't tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

For scientists, reality is not optional.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

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

People ask without wanting to know.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Your blood for mine. If not these, then those. War is the supreme mathematics problem. It strains our skulls, yet we work out the sums, believing we have pressed the most monstrous quantities into a balanced equation.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

The room looks as if a giant dog after a large lunch of food, socks, paints, trousers and pencils, walked into that room and vomited everywhere.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Until that moment I'd thought I could have it both ways; to be one of them, and also my husband's wife. What conceit! I was his instrument, his animal. Nothing more. How we wives and mothers do perish at the hands of our own righteousness. I was just one more of those women who clamp their mouths shut and wave the flag as their nation rolls off to conquer another in war. Guilty or innocent, they have everything to lose. They are what there is to lose. A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.

~ Barbara Kingsolver