Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

245 Sourced Quotes

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
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
This will be Great Mam's last spring. Her last June apples. Her last fresh roasting ears from the garden.

Barbara Kingsolver
You think you're the foreigner here, and I'm the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that... to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner, too.

Barbara Kingsolver
Respecting the dignity of a spectacular food means enjoying it at its best. Europeans celebrate the short season of abundant asparagus as a form of holiday. In the Netherlands the first cutting coincides with Father's Day, on which restaurants may feature all-asparagus menus and hand out neckties decorated with asparagus spears.

Barbara Kingsolver
How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.

Barbara Kingsolver
Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.

Barbara Kingsolver
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.

Barbara Kingsolver
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.

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

Barbara Kingsolver
Children model the behavior of adults, on whatever scale is available to them. Ours are growing up in a nation whose most important, influential men - from presidents to the coolest film characters - solve problems by killing people.... We have taught our children in a thousand ways, sometimes with flag-waving and sometimes with a laugh track, that the bad guy deserves to die.

Barbara Kingsolver
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.

Barbara Kingsolver
Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view.

Barbara Kingsolver
Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence.

Barbara Kingsolver
In exchange for his first taste of powdered milk, Pascal showed me a tree we could climb to find a bird's nest. After we handled and examined the pink-skinned baby birds, he popped one of them into his mouth like a jujube. It seemed to please him a lot. He offered a baby bird to me, pantomiming that I should eat it. I understood perfectly well what he meant, but I refused. He did not seem disappointed to have to eat the whole brood himself.

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

Barbara Kingsolver
If you're standing in the manure pile, it's somebody's job to mention the stink.

Barbara Kingsolver
Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.

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
From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.

Barbara Kingsolver
Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.

Barbara Kingsolver
Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, 'so far from everything?' When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.

Barbara Kingsolver
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.

Barbara Kingsolver
The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually bring down the charming, infuriating naïveté of Americans that allows us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret ugliness that bring us whatever we want.

Barbara Kingsolver
Our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.

Barbara Kingsolver
Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used.

Barbara Kingsolver
Americans who read and think are patriots of the first order. The kind who know enough to roll their eyes whenever anyone tries to claim sole custody of the flag and weild it as a blunt instrument. There are as many ways to love America as there are Americans, and our country needs us all.

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

Barbara Kingsolver
Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.

Barbara Kingsolver
There must be limits, somewhere, to the human footprint on this earth. When the whole of the world is reduced to nothing but human product, we will have lost the map that can show us how we got here, and can offer our spirits an answer when we ask why. Surely we are capable of declaring sacred some quarters that we dare not enter or possess.

Barbara Kingsolver