Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

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. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light.

Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.

Pay attention to your dreams; when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness.

An imperfectly remembered life is a useless treachery. Every day, more fragments of the past roll around heavily in the chambers of an empty brain, shedding bits of color, a sentence or a fragrance, something that changes and then disappears. It drops like a stone to the bottom of the cave.

Plus," Tig said, "it reminds me to be patient. Seeing all these people that have passed on. I get frustrated sometimes, waiting." "For people to die?" "Yeah. To be honest. The guys in charge of everything right now are so old. They really are, Mom. Older than you. They figured out the meaning of life in, I guess, the nineteen fifties and sixties. When it looked like there would always be plenty of everything.

But the wicked have a different head for numbers than most. Any bad they do will end up on the side of never-mind. What's done to them weighs double.

You lie down with snakes, you get up with the urge to bite back. All I'm saying.

Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.

Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I was afflicted with Africa like a bout of a rare disease from which I have not managed a full recovery.

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

If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.

Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.

Mother, you can still hold hold on but forgive, forgive and give for long as long as we both shall live, I forgive you, Mother.

You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they're not self-sufficient.

Mama always said barefoot and pregnant was not my style. She knew.

Mother could go for one year without food, but not one day without her lip sticks.

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

You know reviewers, they are the wind in their own sails.

What you hold in your hands right now, beneath these words, is consecrated air and time and sunlight and, first of all, a place.

I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they're feeling because that's how I read the seed catalogs in January.

Sometimes I've survived anger only one minute at a time, by saying to myself again and again that the best kind of revenge is some kind of life beyond this, some kind of goodness. And I can lay no claim to goodness until I can prove that mean people have not made me mean.

The power of words is awful, Frida. Sometimes I want to bury my typewriter in a box of quilts. The radio makes everything worse, because of the knack for amplifying dull sounds. Any two words spoken in haste might become law of the land. But you never know which two. You see why I won't talk to newsmen.

Actual fact: you could make an entire second world out of what people throw away. The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in day out.

To think is not always to see.