Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

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.

So one time when I was working in this motel one of the toilets leaked and I had to replace the flapper ball. Here's what it said on the package; I kept it till I knew it by heart: 'Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.' That's kind of my philosophy about men. I don't think there's an installation out there that could use all my parts.

Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.

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

It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise

If men only knew, modesty makes women fall in love faster than all the cock-a-doodling in the world.

Be sweet and carry a sharp knife, was her motto.

Unsheltered, I live in daylight. And like the wandering bird I rest in thee.

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

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.

Feminine' was a test like some witch trial she was preordained to fail.

Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.

Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility

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

You think you're the foreigner here, and I'm the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner, too.

Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, confidence swaggering into the storm: Man against Nature. Of all the possible conflicts, that was the one that was hopeless. Even a slim education had taught her this much: Man loses.

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.

Keeping secrets from young ears only plants seeds in between them

A blank space on a form, the missing page, a void, a hole in your knowledge of someone--it's still some real thing . It exists. You don't get to fill it in with whatever you want.

I got up every day thinking the sun was out there shining, and it could just as well shine on me as any other human person.

Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what's not in it.

Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man's skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people's back yards.

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