Barbara Kingsolver citations

Page 2

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Morning always comes.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“… 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.”

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

“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.”