Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

245 Sourced Quotes

I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world.

Barbara Kingsolver
Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.

Barbara Kingsolver
Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind.

Barbara Kingsolver
Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.

Barbara Kingsolver
I've seen how you can't learn anything when you're trying to look like the smartest person in the room.

Barbara Kingsolver
Scientific illiteracy in our populations is leaving too many of us unprepared to discuss or understand much of the damage we are wreaking on our atmosphere, our habitat, and even the food that enters our mouths.

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

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
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've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.

Barbara Kingsolver
Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.

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

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