Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
245 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
This will be Great Mam's last spring. Her last June apples. Her last fresh roasting ears from the garden.
Barbara Kingsolver
Source
Report...
Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.
Barbara Kingsolver
Source
Report...
If you're standing in the manure pile, it's somebody's job to mention the stink.
Barbara Kingsolver
Source
Report...
It's tough to break yourself as news to a town that already knows you.
Barbara Kingsolver
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.
Barbara Kingsolver
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.
Barbara Kingsolver
Source
Report...
Height isn't something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.
Barbara Kingsolver
Source
Report...
This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.
Barbara Kingsolver
Source
Report...
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.
Barbara Kingsolver
Source
Report...
There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.
Barbara Kingsolver
Source
Report...
With all due respect for the wondrous ways people have invented to amuse themselves and one another on paved surfaces, I find that this exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad. I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant's way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.
Barbara Kingsolver
Source
Report...
I look at my four boys, who are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether.
Barbara Kingsolver
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Quote of the day
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
Barbara Kingsolver
Born:
April 8, 1955
(age 69)
Bio:
Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist and poet. She was raised in rural Kentucky and lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood.
Known for:
The Poisonwood Bible (1998)
Flight Behavior (2012)
The Bean Trees (1988)
The Lacuna (2009)
Prodigal Summer: A Novel (2000)
Most used words:
life
people
love
time
day
person
child
small
live
human
kind
food
bad
god
understand
Barbara Kingsolver on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
Barbara Kingsolver Short Quotes
American Essayist Quotes
Essayist Quotes
20th-century Essayist Quotes
20th-century Women
Women Essayists
Related People
Margaret Atwood
Canadian Poet
Amy Tan
American Novelist
Wendell Berry
American Author
Ann Patchett
American Memoirist
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes