Barbara Kingsolver quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Barbara Kingsolver on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

One way of surviving heartache is to stay busy. Making something right in at least one tiny corner of the vast house of wrongs...

I'm too fascinated to hide indoors or stay cooped up in our yard. Curiosity killed the cat, I know, but I try to land on my feet.

From what he could see she had the legs of a much younger woman. Certainly not what he would have expected in the way of Unitarian legs.

They say you thatched your roof and now you must not run out of your house if it rains.

When men want to kiss you they act like they are just on the brink of doing something that's going to change the whole wide world.

Sympathizing over the behavior of men is the baking soda of women's friendships, it seems,the thing that makes them bubble and rise.

In our state - no kidding - they are called Standards of Learning, or "SOLs." (I don't think anyone intended the joke.)

Even the bells from the churches have a conversation, all ringing at once.

My future was mapped in negatives. Next year, I could be anywhere but here.

It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.

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.

Over the phone, her laughter sounded like a warm bath.

Everyone wants the tallest tree to fall

Priests were illegal, saying the mass was illegal, all banned by the Revolution.

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.

Some of life's greatest calls were answered not by the head but by the body.

What keeps you going isn't just some fine destination but the road you're on and the fact you know how to drive.

We cannot jump to conclusions. All we can do is measure and count. That is the task of science.

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.

It's monstrous, what one person will do to another.

Take one trip overland here and you'll know forever that a road in the jungle is a sweet, flat, impossible dream.

There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.

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.

Parenting is something that happens mostly while you're thinking of something else.

Or the quaking misgivings that infected every step forward, after a loss.

Move on. Walk forward into the light.

The past is all we know of the future.

If you look hard enough you can always see reasons, but you'll go crazy if you think it's all punishment for your sins.

After a while Estevan said, What I really hate is not belonging in any place. To be unwanted everywhere.

It's just lucky for Father he never had any sons. He might have been forced to respect them.

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

No reporter worth his buttons will let the facts intrude on a good story.

Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their skulls and onto paper.

She wondered if humiliation ever ran its natural course and peeled off, like a sunburn, or just kept blazing.

Bobby Bingo had skin like a baked potato. A complete vegetable man, Lou Ann thought,

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

Modern people are just like ancient ones, only more numerous.

In my opinion, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from a greaty height.

She's never forgotten, either, how a mystery caught in the hand could lose its grace

Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them.

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

He behaves as if he had no dead children. The real Leandro never comes here. He only pretends.

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

To think is not always to see.

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 ...

I don't *ever* write about real people. Art is supposed to be better than that. If you want a slice of life, look out the window.

I had decided early on that if I couldn't dress elegant, I'd dress memorable.

This is what it means to be very slow: every story you would like to tell has already ended before you can open your mouth.

I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.

It's a selfish habit. I never learn anything from listening to myself.

There are days when I am envious of my hens:
when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure
as a single daily egg.

Downstream is always someone else's up.

No, you shouldn't have come here. But you are here, so yes, you should be here. There are more words in the world then yes and no.

Poor thing, thought Garnett, to have to commit yourself so hard to one moment of poor judgment.

Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don't; but we wear it all the same

A woman without a man
a condition of 'manlessness'
is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife.

The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.

Sometimes that happens. Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them," she said. "It works out.

In almost thirty years of walking around on the grass of the world, she couldn't recall having spent two minutes alone with a butterfly.

I almost never respect men. They're like flowers
all show, a lot of color and lust. You pick them and throw them on the ground.

It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

Nothing wondrous can come in this world unless it rests on the shoulders of kindness. He

The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.

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.

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

Hope is a renewable option:
If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

My thoughts kept straying onto random paths ... hoping to get lost in a thicket.

That means you're my kid," I explained, "and I'm your mother, and nobody can say it isn't so.

It is completely usual for me to get up in the morning, take a look around, and laugh out loud.

If it's important, your heart remembers.

On the weekends. He'd mentioned a place called Sweet Briar where he met other scientists. She felt the trailer's absence

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

The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.

The sting of a fly, the Congolese say, can launch the end of the world. How simply things begin.

Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.

You could allow a gentleman the privacy of his piss.

A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.

Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!

Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.

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

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

So she was what Hester called a 911 Christian: in the event of an emergency, call the Lord.

Science doesn't tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.

King Billy nectaring on the harbinger.

The first sentence of a book is a promise.

Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view.

We will change our ways significantly as a nation not when some laws tell us we have to (remember Prohibition?), but when we want to.

Daddy and I got married kind of accidentally.

The clock gulps softly, eating second whole while she waits ...

I don't know," Magda says, "Seems like that's just how it is with you and me. We're like islands on the moon.

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

I'd forgotten how trees full of bird sounds made you sense the world differently: that life didn't just stop at eye level.

So Noah cursed all Ham's children to be slaves forever and ever. That's how come them to turn out dark

If you're standing in the manure pile, it's somebody's job to mention the stink.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

There are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I'm concerned that's like accusing a dog of having a bark!

School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.