Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

I never put real people into my fiction -- I can't see the slightest point of that, when I have the alternative of inventing utterly subservient slave-people, whose every detail of appearance and behavior I can bend to serve my theme and plot.

One person's picture postcard is someone else's normal.

Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining?

God speaks for the silent man.

Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.

we sang in church Tata Nzolo ! Which means Father in Heaven or Father of Fish Bait depending on just how you sing it, and that pretty well summed up my quandry.

They couldn't close out the whole world, maybe, but they could sure find something on their TV or radio to put scientists or foreigners or whatever they thought he was in a bad light. Truly, they were no better than the city people always looking down on southerners ... If people played their channels right, they could be spared from disagreement for the length of their natural lives. Finally she got it. The need for so many channels.

Move on. Walk forward into the light.

This is how we celebrate the Day of the Dead in America: by turning up our collars against the scent of earthworms calling us home.

When your parent clocks out before you clock in, you can spend way too much of your life staring into that black hole.

The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment's pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence.

If I kept trying to be what everybody wanted, I'd soon be insipid enough to fit in everywhere.

I was occupied so entirely by each day, I felt detached from anything so large as a month or a year. History didn't cross my mind. Now it does. Now I know, whatever your burdens, to hold yourself apart from the lot of more powerful men is an illusion. On that awful day in January 1961, Lumumba paid with a life and so did I. On the wings of an owl the fallen Congo came to haunt even our little family, we messengers of goodwill adrift on a sea of mistaken intentions.

God hates us, I said. Don't blame God for what ants have to do. We all get hungry. Congolese people are not so different from Congolese ants. They have to swarm over a village and eat other people alive? When they are pushed down long enough they will rise up. If they bite you, they are trying to fix things in the only way they know.

Yet I stake a claim, I am here, for I must be somewhere. But only as a child it seems, struggling to understand what every wife and gentleman passing on the street seems to know by rote. Whom to love, whom to castigate.

Do you know, I spent the first half of my life avoiding motherhood and tires, and now I'm counting them as blessings?

The war's [World War II] end has left America with loads of get-up-and-go, and no place to go.

Water, in Grace, is an all-or-nothing proposition, like happiness. When you have rain you have more than enough, just as when you're happy and in love and content with your life, you can't remember how you ever could have felt cheated by fate.

Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.

Even the vendors sitting on stools around the periphery work steadily at connection, nodding at potential buyers, like a sewing machine prodding its needle into the cloth.

Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end.

Here, bodily damage is more or less considered to be a by-product of living, not a disgrace.

A mother's unfulfilled ambitions lie heaviest on her daughters.

Isn't it awfully sad to thing that's all history amounts to, just following the next stupid fashion?