Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

But nothing on this earth is guaranteed, when you get right down to it, you know? I've been thinking about that. About how your kids aren't really YOURS, they're just these people that you try to keep an eye on, and hope you'll all grow up someday to like each other and still be in one piece. What I mean is, everything you get is really just on loan. Does that make sense? Sure, I said. Like library books. Sooner or later they've all got to go back into the nightdrop.

I said probably they were just scared he was going to put ideas in our heads. She smiled. "Imagine that. A teacher, putting ideas in kids' heads.

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

You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.

War so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.

Whatever you want the most, it's going to be the worst thing for you.

He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.

If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

The most important part of a story is the piece of it you don't know.

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

Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It's peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.

whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. And peace will be with you.

There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.

Sometimes I still have American dreams. I mean literally. I see microwave ovens and exercise machines and grocery store shelves with 30 brands of shampoo, and I look at these things oddly, in my dream. I stand and think, What is all this for? What is the hunger that drives this need? I think it's fear. Codi, I hope you won't be hurt by this, but I don't think I'll ever be going back. I don't think I can.

Sunday school stories are just another type of superhero comic. Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending up the Batman signal.

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn't.

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

If you can't dress expensive, dress memorable.

God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.

People ask without wanting to know.

Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn't been totaled or repossessed.

Human manners are wildly inconsistent; plenty of people have said so. But this one takes the cake: the manner in which we're allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point that out. The conspicious consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spirtual error, or even bad manners.

Mi'ija, in a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can.