Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

245 Sourced Quotes

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.

Barbara Kingsolver
Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

Barbara Kingsolver
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.

Barbara Kingsolver
Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work—that goes on, it adds up.

Barbara Kingsolver
Poor Africa. No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.

Barbara Kingsolver
I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.

Barbara Kingsolver
Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they're afraid to plant themselves?

Barbara Kingsolver
Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It's peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.

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
The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.

Barbara Kingsolver
We tap our toes to chaste love songs about the silvery moon without recognizing them as hymns to copulation.

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

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

Barbara Kingsolver
They were completely quiet, but toward the end of the day you really can't tell what that means. It could be awe or brain death, the symptoms are identical.

Barbara Kingsolver
Most of the girls my age, or even younger, have babies. They appear way too young to be married, till you look in their eyes. Then you'll see it. Their eyes look happy and sad at the same time, but unexcited by anything, shifting easily off to the side as if they've already seen most of what there is. Married eyes.

Barbara Kingsolver
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.

Barbara Kingsolver
He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

Barbara Kingsolver
When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven

Barbara Kingsolver
What school is about; two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.

Barbara Kingsolver
We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.

Barbara Kingsolver
We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

Barbara Kingsolver
If I had to give up my life for anything, it would have to have the resilience of hope, the elation of new literacy, the brilliant life of a field of flowers, the elementary kindness of bread. Nothing short of that. It would have to be something as sure as love.

Barbara Kingsolver
Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.

Barbara Kingsolver
What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

Barbara Kingsolver
Growing food was the first activity that gave us enough prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories, and build our cities.

Barbara Kingsolver