Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

when the public nerve is aroused, the most impressive capacity of man is his skill for lying.

Even the bells from the churches have a conversation, all ringing at once.

penitence is more attainable than permission.

When men want to kiss you they act like they are just on the brink of doing something that's going to change the whole wide world.

Summer's heat had never really arrived, nor the cold in it's turn, and everything living now seemed to yearn for sun with the anguish of the unloved. The world of sensible seasons had come undone.

There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, There now, hang on, you'll get over it. Sadness is more or less like a head cold—with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

I was so depressed I stopped using hair spray for three weeks.

No credit given for all the extra miles that take you nowhere.

That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that's how they do it here. Maybe he's been in Africa so long he's forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it's called Monotony.

Already? How can this be?" I would ask, shattered by the terrible truth that I needed a three-ring binder and some #2 pencils. It's not that school was a bad thing. Summer was just so much better.

Insomnia is different,' I said. It was hard to explain this to people. 'You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That's what it's like in my head. The light stays on.

They say you thatched your roof and now you must not run out of your house if it rains.

You talk about her as if she is the Notre Dame Cathedral! She is. And the Statue of Liberty and Abbey Road and the best burrito of your life. Didn't you know?

Think of all the duties that were perfectly obvious to Paul or Matthew in that old Arabian desert that are pure nonsense to us now. All that foot washing, for example. Was it really for God's glory or just to keep the sand out of the house?

What Aunt Tess loved to say was: "Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up your pace.

I will never understand it," she said. "We're the top of our food chain, so you'd think we'd relate to those guys the best. Seems like we'd be trying to talk them into trade agreements." Eddie laughed at that. "So you're telling me that as a kid, you were rooting for the wolf to eat the Riding Hood babe?" "My last name was Wolfe. I took it all kind of personally.

I vow I shall give all my very best books to the underprivileged, once I have read them

She'd heard theories in her time regarding the number-one enemy of everything, ranging from Osama bin Laden to premarital sex. The dust theory she liked.

Soon the maroon-throated howls would echo back from the other trees, father down the beach, until the whole jungle filled with roaring trees. As it was in the beginning, so it is every morning of the world.

He would have no inkling of the great slog of effort that tied up people like her in the day-to-day.

I know how people are with their habits of mind... as a husband quits a wife, leaving her with her naked body curled around the emptied-out mine of her womb. I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill.

White is not an origin. It's a mental construct of privilege.

A story is like a painting, Sóli. It doesn't have to look like what you see out the window.