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Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

Barbara Kingsolver is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the novel Demon Copperhead. Her work often focuses on topics such as social justice, biodiversity, and the interaction between humans and their communities and environments.

Kingsolver has received numerous awards, including the Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award 2011 and the National Humanities Medal. After winning for The Lacuna in 2010 and Demon Copperhead in 2023, Kingsolver became the first author to win the Women's Prize for Fiction twice. Each of her books published since 1993 has been on the New York Times Best Seller list.Kingsolver was raised in rural Kentucky, lived briefly in the Congo in her early childhood, and currently lives in the Appalachia area of the United States. She earned degrees in biology, ecology, and evolutionary biology at DePauw University and the University of Arizona and worked as a freelance writer before she began writing novels. In 2000, Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize to support "literature of social change".



Wikipedia  

✵ 8. April 1955
Barbara Kingsolver photo

Works

The Poisonwood Bible
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
Animal Dreams
Animal Dreams
Barbara Kingsolver
The Bean Trees
The Bean Trees
Barbara Kingsolver
The Poisonwood Bible
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
Animal Dreams
Animal Dreams
Barbara Kingsolver
The Bean Trees
The Bean Trees
Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver: 119 quotes0 likes

Famous Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

“Morning always comes.”

Barbara Kingsolver

“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.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Bean Trees

Source: The Bean Trees

“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.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Bean Trees

Source: The Bean Trees

“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.”

Barbara Kingsolver Pigs in Heaven

Source: Pigs in Heaven

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

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

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

Barbara Kingsolver book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Source: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Barbara Kingsolver Quotes about life

“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.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Bean Trees

Animal Dreams.
Animal Dreams (1990)
Variant: The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.
Source: The Bean Trees

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

Barbara Kingsolver Animal Dreams

Source: Animal Dreams

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

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

“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.”

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 The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver Quotes about people

“Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?”

Barbara Kingsolver book Flight Behavior

Source: Flight Behavior

“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

“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.”

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 Animal Dreams

Source: Animal Dreams

“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 Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver: Trending quotes

“Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

“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.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Bean Trees

Source: The Bean Trees

Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

“She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on.”

Barbara Kingsolver Animal Dreams

Source: Animal Dreams

“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.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

“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.”

Barbara Kingsolver Pigs in Heaven

Source: Pigs in Heaven

“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 The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

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

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

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

Barbara Kingsolver book Small Wonder

Source: Small Wonder

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

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

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

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

“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 The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

“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.”

Barbara Kingsolver

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

Barbara Kingsolver The Bean Trees

Source: The Bean Trees

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

Barbara Kingsolver

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

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

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

Barbara Kingsolver Animal Dreams

Source: Animal Dreams

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

Barbara Kingsolver book The Lacuna

Source: The Lacuna

“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.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

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

Barbara Kingsolver

Source: Homeland and Other Stories

“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.”

Barbara Kingsolver book Prodigal Summer

Source: Prodigal Summer (2000).

“The truth needs so little rehearsal.”

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 The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

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

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

“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 The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

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

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

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

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

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

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

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

Barbara Kingsolver book Prodigal Summer

Source: Prodigal Summer

“Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.”

Barbara Kingsolver book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Source: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

“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.”

Barbara Kingsolver book Prodigal Summer

Source: Prodigal Summer

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

Barbara Kingsolver book Prodigal Summer

Source: Prodigal Summer

“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.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

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

Barbara Kingsolver book Prodigal Summer

Source: Prodigal Summer

“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

“… 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 The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

“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 Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

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

Barbara Kingsolver book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Source: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

“Love weighs nothing.”

Barbara Kingsolver

“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.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

“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 The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

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

Barbara Kingsolver The Bean Trees

Source: The Bean Trees

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

Barbara Kingsolver The Bean Trees

Source: The Bean Trees

“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.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Bean Trees

Source: The Bean Trees

“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.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

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