Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

Greatness is very boring.

It was a true conversation. About whether our ancestors had more important lives than we do. And how they've managed to trick us, if they did not.

It's frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets rough you fall back on whatever awful think you grew up with.

Two dots an inch apart, as small and tidy as punctuation marks at the end of a sentence none of us could read. The sentence would have started somewhere just above her heart.

Trust the road. Because nobody stays, in the long run you're on your own with your ghosts. You're the ship, they're the bottle.

At lunch break [from cheesemaking] I checked out the wildly colorful powder room, where a quote from Alice in Wonderland was painted on the wall: There's no use in trying,' Alice said. 'One can't believe impossible things.' I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

She understands all at once, with a small shock, exactly what it is she always needed to tell Harland: being there in person is not the same as watching. You might see things better on television, but you'll never know if you were alive or dead while you watched.

From what he could see she had the legs of a much younger woman. Certainly not what he would have expected in the way of Unitarian legs.

I'm too fascinated to hide indoors or stay cooped up in our yard. Curiosity killed the cat, I know, but I try to land on my feet.

He could construct defeat from any available material and live inside it, but for once Dellarobia didn't go there with him. She was going ahead.

Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don't, but we wear it all the same. There's only one question worth asking now: How do we aim to live with it?

Where you'd be wearing out the knees of your trousers, sir, they just have to go ahead and wear out their knees!

I can still feel in my bones how being mad was the one thing holding me together.

I thought I'd had a pretty hard life. But I keep finding out that life can be hard in ways I never knew about.

Every family's its own trip to China.

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side. Betrayal is a friend I have known a long time, a two-faced goddess looking forward and back with a clear, earnest suspicion of good fortune.

Words were not just words, describing things a person could see. Even if most did not. Maybe they had to know a thing first, to see it.

And fairly enough she thought, for that was the way of the world. A road was to be driven upon. The candy dish was there to be eaten, money in the bank got spent, people claimed whatever they could get their hands on. Wasn't that more or less automatic? For a human being to do any less seemed impossible.

Take one trip overland here and you'll know forever that a road in the jungle is a sweet, flat, impossible dream.

She is not a bulldog, only a woman pressed into the shape of a small jar, possibly attempting to dance in there. It shows in the way she places a seashell on a window sill, a red-painted chair in the corner: she is practiced in the art of creating a still life and taking up residence inside it.

The wonder to me now is that I thought my life worth saving...Desperate to save myself in a river of people saving themselves. And if they chanced to look down and see me struggling underneath them, they saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious.

The Middle East and North Africa are almost out of water. Asia's underwater. Syria is dystopian, Somalia, Bangladesh, dystopian. Everybody's getting weather that never happened before. Melting permafrost means we've got like, a minute to turn this mess around, or else it's going to stop us.

This came as a strange letdown, to see how the game always went to those who knew the rules without understanding the lesson.

Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending up the Batman signal.