Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

I could see that the whole idea and business of Childhood was nothing guaranteed. It seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown-up life like a frill on a dress.

Those of us who give body and soul to projects that never seem to end- child rearing, housecleaning, gardening- know the value of the occasional closed door. We need our moments of declared truce.

Alice hands Annawake a handkerchief. Young people never carry them, she's noticed. They haven't yet learned that heartbreak can catch up to you on any given day.

But a Congolese life is like the useless Congolese bill, which you can pile by the fistful or the bucketful into a merchant's hand, and still not purchase a single banana. It's dawning on me that I live among men and women who've simply always understood their whole existence is worth less than a banana to most white people. I see it in their eyes when they glance up at me.

Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.

If people really gave it full consideration, I mean, like if you could return a baby after thirty days' examination like one of those Time-Life books, then I figure the entire human species would go extinct in a month's time.

Sept 15 1930 at the independence festival of the school of cretins…At the head of the table by the bowl of pomegranates, Senora Bartolome had put a note: Take only one, our Lord Jesus is watching!. A second note appeared at the foot of the table beside the sugared almonds: Take all you want, Jesus is looking at the pomegranates.

She looked like Cinderella in reverse, stepped out from her life at the ball for a day of misery among the ashes.

After arriving on the ancestral soil I figured out pretty quickly why that [Italian] heritage swamps all competition. It's a culture that sweeps you in, sits you down in the kitchen, and feeds you so well you really don't want to leave.

The effect is both domestic and wild, equal parts geometric and chaotic. It's the visual signature of small, diversified farms that creates the picture-postcard landscape here, along with its celebrated gastronomic one. Couldn't Americans learn to love landscapes like these around our cities, treasuring them not just gastronomically but aesthetically, instead of giving everything over to suburban development? Can we only love agriculture on postcards?

What a knot of history one mistake can become.

If humanity survives long enough to understand what he really was, they can dig him up and put on display the grandiose depravity of the twentieth century.

The 2-week delay of her letters had caused me to keep a distrustful eye on Hallie, like a star so many light years away it could have exploded long ago while we still watched its false shine.

Well, the ancients might not have been very heroic. Most of them were probably like Mother, crouched somewhere trying to work out how to make fake jawbone jewelry that would look like the real thing.

What there is in this world, I think, is a tendency for human errors to level themselves like water throughout their sphere of influence. That's pretty much the whole of what I can say, looking back. There's the possibility of balance. Unbearable burdens that the world somehow does bear with a certain grace.

She married him two years ago for love, or so she thought, and he's a good enough man but a devotee of household silence. His idea of marriage is to spray WD-40 on anything that squeaks. ... The quiet only subsides when Harland sleeps and his tonsils make up for lost time.

It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present." Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

I was a skeleton with flesh and clothes and thoughts.

Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise.

When I was Turtle's age I had never had anyone or anything important taken from me. I still hadn't. Maybe I hadn't started out with a whole lot, but pretty nearly all of it was still with me.

The room looks as if a giant dog after a large lunch of food, socks, paints, trousers and pencils, walked into that room and vomited everywhere.

When the rain pours down especially, we have long hours of captivity, in which my sisters determinedly grow bored. But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them. Everyone else will finish with the singular plowing through, and Ada still has discoveries ahead and behind.

The essential ingredient of authorship is authority. You hunt it out in a library, you chase it down the street, or you knit it from the fiber of your own will. From somewhere, you get it. You begin

Peace and Love, get high and fly with the dove.