Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible (1998)

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

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

Barbara Kingsolver
Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.

Barbara Kingsolver
Once the rains abated, my father's garden thrived in the heat like an unleashed temper.

Barbara Kingsolver
Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one, "My life; what I stole from history, and how I live with it.

Barbara Kingsolver
Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.

Barbara Kingsolver
I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.

Barbara Kingsolver
Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.

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
A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after — oh, that' s love by a different name.

Barbara Kingsolver
Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.

Barbara Kingsolver
Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.

Barbara Kingsolver
As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop.

Barbara Kingsolver
Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man's skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people's back yards.

Barbara Kingsolver
Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea.

Barbara Kingsolver
He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.

Barbara Kingsolver
Most of the girls my age, or even younger, have babies. They appear way too young to be married, till you look in their eyes. Then you'll see it. Their eyes look happy and sad at the same time, but unexcited by anything, shifting easily off to the side as if they've already seen most of what there is. Married eyes.

Barbara Kingsolver
In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had - a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.

Barbara Kingsolver
Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don't; but we wear it all the same

Barbara Kingsolver
You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.

Barbara Kingsolver
Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.

Barbara Kingsolver
I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which... is at home at the moment.

Barbara Kingsolver
Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I was afflicted with Africa like a bout of a rare disease from which I have not managed a full recovery.

Barbara Kingsolver
The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.

Barbara Kingsolver
Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.

Barbara Kingsolver
The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.

Barbara Kingsolver
My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.

Barbara Kingsolver
God doesn't need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.

Barbara Kingsolver
Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.

Barbara Kingsolver
A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever.

Barbara Kingsolver