Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

245 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
I'm very cautious about appropriating or representing a view I don't have legitimate authority to represent, because I don't want to take the place of someone who could do that better. I don't write characters from a point of view I don't inhabit. My Congo novel is seen through a bunch of white Southern girls. It's my choice, but I make it carefully.

Barbara Kingsolver
Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.

Barbara Kingsolver
I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.

Barbara Kingsolver
Corn syrup and added fats have been outed as major ingredients in fast food, but they hide out in packaged foods too, even presumed-innocent ones like crackers.

Barbara Kingsolver
He hid a scornful smile under his mustache, which is not a good hiding place.

Barbara Kingsolver
Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.

Barbara Kingsolver
I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.

Barbara Kingsolver
Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.

Barbara Kingsolver
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
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
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
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
Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.

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

Barbara Kingsolver
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
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
He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. "Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.

Barbara Kingsolver
At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.

Barbara Kingsolver
A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.

Barbara Kingsolver
The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.

Barbara Kingsolver
Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom.

Barbara Kingsolver
You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own.

Barbara Kingsolver
But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.

Barbara Kingsolver
Though many people are afraid of science, they're not afraid of sex. As a biologist, I can't think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plants.

Barbara Kingsolver
It takes your sleeping self years to catch up to where you really are.... when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness.

Barbara Kingsolver
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.... The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

Barbara Kingsolver
All the giant silkworm family, the Ios and lunas she admired, did their eating as caterpillars and as adult moths had no mouths. What mute, romantic extravagance, Lusa thought: a starving creature racing with death to scour the night for his mate.

Barbara Kingsolver