Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

“A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.”

“That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don’t know how a person could ever describe that scent.”

“Last time I talked to her she didn't sound like herself. She's depressed. It's awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they're no good.”

“If the Lord hasn't got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that's his business.”

“the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners”

“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is live inside that hope, running down its hallways, touching the walls on both sides.”

“Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.”

“God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.”

“One of the very first things I figured out about life… is that it's better to be a hopeful person than a cynical, grumpy one, because you have to live in the same world either way, and if you're hopeful, you have more fun.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.”

“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.”

“Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.”

“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.”

“There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.”

“The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.”

“Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.”

“Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.”

“But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.”

“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.”

“I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.”

“What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness.”

“The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.”

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

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

“There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.”

“A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.”

“In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.”

“Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”

“It's what you do that makes your soul.”

“Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.”

“Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.”

“The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.”

“It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.”

“If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.”

“Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.”

“Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.”

“The truth needs so little rehearsal.”

“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.”

“It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.”

“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.”

“No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.”

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

“To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.”

“Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.”

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

“Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.”

“If you never stepped on anybody's toes, you never been for a walk.”

“I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.”

“Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.”

“The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.”

“Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.”

“If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.”

“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.”

“… 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…”

“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.”

“Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.”

“Love weighs nothing.”

“I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow… I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.”

“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.”

“Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.”

“I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.”

“It's terrible to lose somebody, but it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse.”

“He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.”

“It's the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.”