Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

245 Sourced Quotes

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

Barbara Kingsolver
People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.

Barbara Kingsolver
Music gives me relief from the flood of words that wakes me up in the morning. It's like a gushing faucet, but it stops when I'm concentrating on playing.

Barbara Kingsolver
Honk if you love Jesus, text while driving if you want to meet up.

Barbara Kingsolver
Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.

Barbara Kingsolver
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?

Barbara Kingsolver
A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.

Barbara Kingsolver
Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.

Barbara Kingsolver
Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them... it works out.

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
A woman without a man — a condition of 'man lessness' — is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife. She must have a family — either of birth or of creation.

Barbara Kingsolver
Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need

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
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

Barbara Kingsolver
If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. That's not gallons, but barrels. Small changes in buying habits can make big differences. Becoming a less energy-dependent nation may just need to start with a good breakfast.

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
On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature's jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck?... I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist.

Barbara Kingsolver
A sound-bite culture can't discuss science very well. Exactly what we're losing when we reduce biodiversity, the causes and consequences of global warming-these traumas can't be adequately summarized in an evening news wrap-up.

Barbara Kingsolver
There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.

Barbara Kingsolver
I wanted to read 'Anna Karenina' and everybody else wanted to do stuff in the back of cars.

Barbara Kingsolver
It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

Barbara Kingsolver
War so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.

Barbara Kingsolver
I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them...

Barbara Kingsolver
The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.

Barbara Kingsolver
Georgeann, Rose-Johnny is a Lebanese. That's all I'm going to tell you. You'll understand better when you're older.

Barbara Kingsolver
I had decided early on that if I couldn't dress elegant, I'd dress memorable.

Barbara Kingsolver
Maybe life doesn't get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we're willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.

Barbara Kingsolver
Cooking is eighty percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.

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

Barbara Kingsolver