56 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

Barbara Kingsolver quotes

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

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

5. 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.

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

7. 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.

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

9. Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

10. 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.

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

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

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

13. It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

14. It wasn't a matter of courage or dreams, but something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I'd spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.

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

16. Life always provides me with better jokes than any I could invent.

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

18. Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

19. People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

20. Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

21. Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

22. The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

23. The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.

24. The truth needs so little rehearsal.

25. The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.

26. There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

27. Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.

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

29. What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

30. Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.

31. Official Barbara Kingsolver Site

1. Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.

2. Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.

3. The strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

4. Respecting the dignity of a spectacular food means enjoying it at its best. Europeans celebrate the short season of abundant asparagus as a form of holiday. In the Netherlands the first cutting coincides with Father's Day, on which restaurants may feature all-asparagus menus and hand out neckties decorated with asparagus spears.

5. After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.

6. I can count all the ways in which being a mother has enriched my understanding of the world, of character, my sense of the future and my attachment to it. I can't imagine what kind of writer I'd be if I didn't have my kids.

7. But we've all ended up giving body and soul to Africa, one way or another. Even Adah, who's becoming an expert in tropical epidemiology and strange new viruses. Each of us got our heart buried in six feet of African dirt; we are all co-conspirators here. I mean, all of us, not just my family. So what do you do now? You get to find your own way to dig out a heart and shake it off and hold it up to the light again.

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

9. Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity *after* their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it's the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand.

10. Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up.

11. Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn't.

12. 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.

13. This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he is not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.

14. Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair.

15. Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history... Listen being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.

16. The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.

17. My worst nightmare is being stuck somewhere with nothing to read.

18. I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.

19. There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line… People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race, astounded to see the scientists approach, pass the mark, and keep running. It's a common misunderstanding, he said. They conclude there was no race. As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.

20. A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world's best juices for ourselves-these may also be our enemies. The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.

21. This Forest eats itself and lives forever.

22. The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.

23. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

24. When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us everyday...

25. 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.