Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

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.

The last generations's worst fears become the next one's B-grade entertainment.

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.

God is frightful, God is great--you pick. I choose this: God is in the details, the completely unnecessary miracles sometimes tossed up as stars to guide us. They are the promise of good fortune in a cloudless day, and the animals in the clouds; look hard enough, and you'll see them. Don't ask if they're real.

Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.

For scientists, reality is not optional.

Beene-beene. The truest truth.

A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.

Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don't respect his work?

Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.

Never be mean in anything. Never be false. Never be cruel. I can always be hopeful of you.

He needs to go rub his soul against life.

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

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.

It's a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.

We would not wake up from this nightmare to find out it was someone's real life, and for once that someone wasn't just a poor unlucky nobody in a shack you could forget about. It was our life, the only one we were going to have.

In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.

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.

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

But still, I'd be darned if I was going to be one of those Americans who stomp around Italy barking commands in ever-louder English. I was going to be one of those Americans who traversed Italy with my forehead knit in concentration, divining wordsw from their Latin roots and answering by wedging French cognates into Italian pronunciations spliced onto a standard Spanish verb conjugation.

Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea.

But time passed and eventually my mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it's going to fucking leave you and not come back.

You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.