Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

life is a wild, impetuous ride. There could be good shit up ahead, don't rule it out.

The urge to lie is produced by the contradictions in our lives. We are made to declare love for our country, while it tramples our rights and dignity.

Lusa turned to Crys, her eyes shining. That was a luna. Crys shrugged. So? So? So what? You want it should sing, too?

Lately whenever I'd scratched somebody's surface I'd turned up a ghost story.

Well, yeah, Dovey said. That's America. We watch shows about rich people's houses and their designer dresses and we drool. It's patriotic.

Eyes can pierce a skull.

The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go. 'We're like coyotes,' he said. 'Get to a good place, turn around three times in the grass, and you're home. Once you know how, you can always do that, no matter what. You won't forget.

Those first few weeks are an unearthly season. From the outside you remain so ordinary, no one can tell from looking that you have experienced an earthquake of the soul. You've been torn asunder, invested with an ancient, incomprehensible magic. It's the one thing that we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.

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 more 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.

I am telling you what I'm telling you. Don't try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky.

I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living.

Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.

I knew Rome was burning, but I had just enough water to scrub the floors, so I did what I could.

The last generation's worst fears became the next one's B-grade entertainment.

And you came over to make sure I was all right, is that what you're telling me? You came over here with your shotgun to protect me from my scarecrow? I had to, Garnett said, spreading his hands, throwing himself on her mercy. I didn't care for the way Buddy was looking at you in your short pants.

I think most people are the same. Until they've gone somewhere.

Having children was not like people said. Forget training them in your footsteps; the minute they put down the teething ring and found the Internet, you were useless as a source of anything but shoes and a winter coat.

I understood that the terror of my recurring dream was not about losing just vision, but the whole of myself, whatever that was. What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

People automatically estimate a mom's IQ at around her children's ages, maybe dividing by the number of kids, rounding up to the nearest pajama size.

The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earring on sad, rich widows

Let's all sing the redneck national anthem: Settle for what you can get.

In my opinion, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from a greaty height.

Oh, Rachel, Rachel, Leah said. Let me give you a teeny little lesson in political science. Democracy and dictatorship are political systems; they have to do with who participates in the leadership. Socialism and capitalism are economic systems. It has to do with who owns the wealth of the nations, and who gets to eat. Can you grasp that?

If trained to nature from an early age, could a mind be freed from its vendetta against the world's creatures?