Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

For six years, from age nineteen until I turned twenty-five, I did not sleep uninterrupted through a single night. . . . I felt lucky to get my shoes on the right feet. . . . I moved forward only, thinking each morning anew that we were leaving the worst behind.

Communism? Most people have no idea what it is. I do not exaggerate. Look around this restaurant, ask any of these fine citizens. 'Excuse me, sir, I've been thinking of an idea, a bunch of working people owning the means of their own production. What do you make of that?' You know, he might be all for it.

I never could figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a big dangerous deal. I mean, we've got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don't we?

We both lay back down, and she looked at me in the eyes, and we were sad together for a while. I'll never forget how that felt. Like not being hungry.

the unbearable persistence of hope

It's not something to fix," he said. "It means strong. Outside of all expectation." I looked at him. He looked at me. His hands were on his desk with the fingers touching, a tiny cage with air inside. Black hands. The knuckles almost blue-black. Silver wedding ring. He said, "You know, sometimes you hear about these miracles, where a car gets completely mangled in a wreck. But then the driver walks out of it alive? I'm saying you are that driver.

His confidence was enviable and maddening. Most of the time she didn't want him to solve or contradict her worries, she just needed him to listen and agree with her on the awfulness at hand. This was a principle of marriage she'd explained many times.

His scent burst onto her brain like a rain of lights, causing her to know him perfectly. This is how moths speak to each other. The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.

A novel has to entertain -- that's the contract with the reader: you give me ten hours and I'll give you a reason to turn every page.

Zeke embodied the contradiction of his generation: jaded about the fate of the world, idealistic about personal prospects.

You can't know somebody, I thought, till you've followed him home.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.

Sometimes history cleaves and for one helpless moment stands still like the pause when the ax splits a log and the two halves rest on end waiting to fall.

I hold on to my adopted shore, chanting private vows: wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need. Let me be a good animal today. Let me dance in the waves of my private tide, the habits of survival and love.

This household is like a pocketful of coins that jingled together for a time, but now have been slapped on a counter to pay a price. The pocket empties out, the coins venture back into the infinite circulation of currency, separate, invisible, and untraceable.

You and I are not like other people. We perceive infinite nature as a fascination, not a threat to our sovereignty.... When the nuisance of old mythologies falls away from us, we may see with new eyes.

It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.

a single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. and, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. this forest eats itself and lives forever.

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 pounding of What do I want went still in her breast. It didn't matter what she chose. The world was what it was, a place with its own rules of hunger and satisfaction. Creatures lived and mated and died, they came and went, as surely as summer did. They would go their own ways, of their own accord.

The obstinate practicality of old women pierces and fortifies these families like the steel rods buried in walls of powdery concrete.

fallen hero shatters into more sharp pieces than you'd believe.

A person can succeed and fail at the same time. Maybe letting me down was your way of getting me to be me.