Barbara Kingsolver citations

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”