Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

245 Sourced Quotes

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
Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.

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

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

Barbara Kingsolver
Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise.

Barbara Kingsolver
Lies are infinite in number, and the truth so small and singular.

Barbara Kingsolver
A meaningless phrase repeated again and again begins to resemble truth.

Barbara Kingsolver
Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.

Barbara Kingsolver
I fell in with people assisting refugees fleeing war in central America and Chile that was funded by the US government. They were fleeing phosphorus bombs I'd paid for with my tax dollars. I learned Spanish, and a new side of the story, from Chilean refugees sleeping on my floor.

Barbara Kingsolver
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
I was trained in classical piano, but it kind of dawned on me that classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest of [them] get to play 'Blue Moon' in a hotel lobby.

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
I was politically naive. Then I got to college, with all the marching, and the war ended, Nixon resigned. I thought, people can yell and make a difference.

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
My own relationships with the animals in my life are absurdly complex: Some I love, some I eat, and the scraps left over from the ones I eat, I feed to the ones I love.

Barbara Kingsolver
What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.

Barbara Kingsolver
Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.

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
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
The first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the
selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see. Presumably the
unselfish motives will follow as we wise up.

Barbara Kingsolver
Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

Barbara Kingsolver
Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

Barbara Kingsolver
There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

Barbara Kingsolver