Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

It’s a funny thing to complain about, but most of America is perfectly devoid of smells. I must have noticed it before, but this last time back I felt it as an impairment. For weeks after we arrived I kept rubbing my eyes, thinking I was losing my sight or maybe my hearing. But it was the sense of smell that was gone. Even in the grocery store, surrounded in one aisle by more kinds of food than will ever be known in a Congolese lifetime, there was nothing on the air but a vague, disinfected emptiness. I mentioned this to Anatole, who’d long since taken note of it, of course. “The air is just blank in America,” I said. “You can’t ever smell what’s around you, unless you stick your nose right down into something.“Maybe that is why they don’t know about Mobutu,” he suggested.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Our holiday food splurge was a small crate of tangerines, which we found ridiculously thrilling after an eight-month abstinence from citrus.... Lily hugged each one to her chest before undressing it as gently as a doll. Watching her do that as she sat cross-legged on the floor one morning in pink pajamas, with bliss lighting her cheeks, I thought: Lucky is the world, to receive this grateful child. Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

The longer I think about a food industry organized around an animal that cannot reproduce itself without technical assistance, the more I mistrust it. Poultry, a significant part of the modern diet, is emblematic of the whole dirty deal. Having no self-sustaining bloodlines to back up the industry is like having no gold standard to underpin paper currency. Maintaining a natural breeding poultry flock is a rebellion, at the most basic level, against the wholly artificial nature of how foods are produced.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

For about 48 weeks of the year an asparagus plant is unrecognizable to anyone except an asparagus grower. Plenty of summer visitors to our garden have stood in the middle of the bed and asked, 'What is this stuff? It's beautiful!' We tell them its the asparagus patch, and they reply, 'No this, these feathery little trees.' An asparagus spear only looks like its picture for one day of its life, usually in April, give or take a month as you travel from the Mason-Dixon Line. The shoot emerges from the ground like a snub nose green snake headed for sunshine, rising so rapidly you can just about see it grow. If it doesn't get it's neck cut off at ground level as it emerges, it will keep growing. Each triangular scale on the spear rolls out into a branch until the snake becomes a four foot tree with delicate needles. Contrary to lore, fat spears are no more tender or mature than thin ones. Each shoot begins life with its own particular girth. In the hours after emergence, it lengthens but does not appreciably fatten. To step into another raging asparagus controversy, white spears are botanically no different from their green colleagues. White shoots have been deprived of sunlight by a heavy mulch pulled up over the plant's crown. European growers go to this trouble for consumers who prefer the stalks before they've had their first blush of photosynthesis. Most Americans prefer the more developed taste of green. Uncharacteristically, we're opting for the better nutritional deal here also. The same plant could produce white or green spears in alternate years, depending on how it is treated. If the spears are allowed to proceed beyond their first exploratory six inches, they'll green out and grow tall and feathery like the house plant known as asparagus fern, which is the next of kin. Older, healthier asparagus plants produce chunkier, more multiple shoots. Underneath lies an octopus-shaped affair of chubby roots called a crown that stores enough starch through the winter to arrange the phallic send-up when winter starts to break. The effect is rather sexy, if you're the type to see things that way. Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac and the church banned it from nunneries.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

As a dinner guest I gratefully eat just about anything that's set before me, because graciousness among friends is dearer to me than any other agenda.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Eating is a genuine need, continuous from our first day to our last, amounting over time to our most significant statement of what we are made of and what we have chosen to make of our connection to home ground.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant's afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it's been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind of all one. You know what Hester told me when we were working the sheep one time? She said it's no good to complain about your flock, because it's the put-together of all your past choices.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

I asked Elsie how much food they needed from outside the community. 'Flour and sugar,' she said, and then thought a bit. 'Sometimes we'll buy pretzels as a spl

~ Barbara Kingsolver

When something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

He lifts her breasts, which fit perfectly into his hands, though he knows this is no promise that he gets to keep them. A million things you can't have will fit in a human hand.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

In Bobby Ogle's version of heaven everyone would wind up in one place, criminals and Muslims included.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

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.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining?

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

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. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she's gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She's the one you can't put down.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,' he said. 'We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

That is surely childhood's end, when you look at a thing like a rabbit needing skinned and have to say: Nobody else is going to do this.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It's what these guys have decided to call America. They have the audacity to say, 'There, you sons of bitches, don't lay a finger on it. That is a finished product.'But any country is still in the making. Always. That's just history, people have to see that.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

The giant beech next door intends to shiver off every hair of its pelt.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

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

Move on. Walk forward into the light.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man's skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people's back yards.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

They said it was to be a revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants’ rooms because they didn’t believe in laundry maids or cooks.Nobody does, really. Why should they? Only in having clean clothes, clean floors, and enchiladas tapatias.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

...animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation's hopes will die with it, and no cumulative progress is possible for the human will.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers with heavy heads. You can shield them with your body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but they'll still move toward him. Without cease they'll bend to his light.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

She has changed in this way that motherhood changes you, so that you forget you ever had time for small things like despising the color pink.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

But I'll tell you a secret. When I want to take God at his word exactly I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

Some of life's greatest calls were answered not by the head but by the body.

~ Barbara Kingsolver