Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

The reason most people have kids is because they get pregnant.

The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.

Everything truly important is washable.

Once the rains abated, my father's garden thrived in the heat like an unleashed temper.

In the places that call me out, I know I'll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.

Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise.

A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.

It's tough to break yourself as news to a town that already knows you.

Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.

Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.

I don't look like who I am.

I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.

The things I carry closest to my heart are things I can't own.

What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?

my own relationships with the animals in my life are absurdly complex: Some I love, some I eat, and the scraps left over from the ones I eat, I feed to the ones I love.

That's how it is: some people are content to wait till you ask, while others jump right in with the whole story.

A woman without a man -- a condition of 'manlessness' -- is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife.

I believe that the people who survive a cataclysm, rather than those who stand by and analyze it, are nearly always the more credible witnesses to their own history.

It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life.

Nine-tenths of human law is about possession.

Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.

A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't this world would end at once.

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their skulls and onto paper.

All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.

I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?

The talkers are rising above the thinkers.

It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.

For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.

...our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.

Downstream is always someone else's up.

If it's important, your heart remembers.

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

The first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see. Presumably the unselfish motives will follow as we wise up.

The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.

organization is the religion of the single parent.

I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.

How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.

Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.

What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.

But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.

restraint equals indulgence

The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.

It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.

My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.

Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom.

The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.

She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn't.

Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.