Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
(on asparagus) Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac, and the church banned it from nunneries.
It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.
Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.
Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.
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.
What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it's going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.
Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down." - Mrs. Brown
A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.
The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.
What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness.
People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.
In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.
Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.
Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.
Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.
The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.
I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.
The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go.
Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.
Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes
To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!
Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don't know what I'm looking for. I just do it.
I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they're feeling because that's how I read the seed catalogs in January.
There are some who'd hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think's been too lucky.
It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.
This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.
A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.
If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.