Barbara Kingsolver: Quotes about life

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.”

“Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own.”

“At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.”