Barbara Kingsolver citations

Page 4

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

“The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering. Yes, maybe we'd like to be able to get places quickly, and carry things in both hands, but only because we have to keep up with the rest of you. We would rather be just like, and have that be all right.”

“How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.”

“But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.”

“What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.”

“When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine.
Pigs in Heaven”

“Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.”

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

“I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.”

“A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.”

“Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.”

“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.”

“If you can't dress expensive, dress memorable.”

“Eyes can pierce a skull.”

“It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.”

“I also thank Bill McKibben and his 350. org colleagues for the most important work in the world, and the most unending.”

“Even the most recalcitrant climate scientists agree now, the place is heating up. pretty much every one of the lot. Unless some other outcome is written on the subject line of his paycheck. […] If you were here to get information, Tina, you would not be standing in my laboratory telling me what scientists think.”

“Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.”

“He was wounded. I suppose some sharp thing in me wanted to sting him, for making me need him now. After he'd once cut me to the edge of what a soul will bear. But that was senseless…. I looked at this grown-up Loyd and tried to make sense of him, seeing clearly that he was too sweet to survive around me. I would go to my grave expecting the weapon in the empty hand.”

“I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire.”

“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.”

“Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.”

“A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.”

“Cub retreated to the familiar grounds of remorse and insufficiency, the terms of his existence, ratified by marriage. He could construct defeat from any available material and live inside it, but for once Dellarobia didn't go there with him. she was going ahead.”

“There is some kind of juice in our brains that makes us only care about what's in front of us right this minute. Even if we know something different will happen later and we should think about that too. […] If I could teach you one thing, Preston, that's it. Think about what's coming at you later on.”

“The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.”

“A flock is nothing but the put-together of all your past choices.”

“We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.”