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

Barbara Kingsolver
If you never stepped on anybody's toes, you never been for a walk.

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

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
Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But 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. All secrets are witnessed.

Barbara Kingsolver
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.

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

Barbara Kingsolver
A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world's best juices for ourselves-these may also be our enemies. The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.

Barbara Kingsolver
There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

Barbara Kingsolver
Ah, the mysterious croak. Here today, gone tomorrow. It's the best reason I can think of to throw open the blinds and risk belief. Right now, this minute, time to move out into the grief and glory. High tide.

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
Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!

Barbara Kingsolver
The thing is, it's my own fault. I just can't put up with a person that won't go out of his way for me. And that's what a man is. Somebody that won't go out of his way for you. I bet it says that in the dictionary.

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

Barbara Kingsolver
Organization is the religion of the single parent.

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. They are what we call civilization.

Barbara Kingsolver
The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering. Yes, maybe we'd like to be able to get places quickly, and carry things in both hands but only because we have to keep up with the rest of you... We would rather be just like us, and have that be all right.

Barbara Kingsolver
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.

Barbara Kingsolver
No matter what kind of night you're having, morning always wins.

Barbara Kingsolver
A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.

Barbara Kingsolver
Hallie and I... were all there was. The image in the mirror that proves you are still here. We had exactly one sister apiece. We grew up knowing the simple arithmetic of scarcity: A sister is more precious than an eye.

Barbara Kingsolver
A meaningless phrase repeated again and again begins to resemble truth.

Barbara Kingsolver
The standard approach has been to pump up the dosage of chemicals... Twenty percent of these approved-for-use pesticides are listed by the EPA as carcinogenic in humans.

Barbara Kingsolver
To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.

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
You know reviewers, they are the wind in their own sails.

Barbara Kingsolver
It's useful to explore a psyche from outside or on the borderline: how we got frozen in the US, while in Mexico artists have leave to be political. Why are we so terrified of that word, communism — the anti-Christ? It's like living in a world where grownups still believe in the bogeyman.

Barbara Kingsolver