Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue.

I felt the breath of God go cold against my skin.

My prior experience with young men was to hear them swear 'Christ almighty in the craphouse!' at any dress with too many buttons.

So she was what Hester called a 911 Christian: in the event of an emergency, call the Lord.

the twins too, they've never cared a hoot what they looked like. They spent so much time staring at each other's faces before they were born they can go the rest of their lives passing up mirrors without a glance.

animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.

But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation's hopes will die with it, and no cumulative progress is possible for the human will.

In exchange for his first taste of powdered milk, Pascal showed me a tree we could climb to find a bird's nest. After we handled and examined the pink-skinned baby birds, he popped one of them into his mouth like a jujube. It seemed to please him a lot. He offered a baby bird to me, pantomiming that I should eat it. I understood perfectly well what he meant, but I refused. He did not seem disappointed to have to eat the whole brood himself.

Scientists are not like other people, sir. We cannot slam our portals. We have to follow evidence where it leads, even if no one likes that place. Even if it suggests that all we have ever believed might be mistaken.

so he just stood there brewing like a coffeepot. Only with a coffeepot you know exactly what's going to come out of it.

This is what it means to be very slow: every story you would like to tell has already ended before you can open your mouth.

Like Daniel she enteres the lions' den, but lacking Daniel's pure and unblemished soul, Ada is spiced with the flavors of vice that make for a tasty meal. Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.

Sometimes the past can vanish.

But the pill did nothing, probably expired like everything else on the premises.

It's a selfish habit. I never learn anything from listening to myself.

She made it plain that her fondest wish was to have a grandbaby. Whenever fat Irene would pick up the baby, which was not too often, Mrs. Hoge would declare, Irene, you don't know how becoming that looks. As if someone ought to have a kid because it looked good on them.

Whatever it is, you can live through it, and it ends.

When the spirit passed through him he groaned, throwing body and soul into his weekly purge. The Amen enema, as I call it. My palindrome for the Reverend.

Battle of Blair Mountain, that turned into the biggest war in America ever, other than the civil one. Twenty thousand guys from all over these mountains, fighting in regiments. They wore red bandannas on their necks to show they were all on the same side, working men. Mr. Armstrong said people calling us rednecks, that goes back to the red bandannas.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

A territory is only possessed for a moment in time.

I felt emptied-out and singing with echoes, unrecognizable to myself: that particular feeling like your own house on the day you move out.

How would you even begin to make a hush puppy, what in the world was in one? Nothing to do with a puppy, surely. Garnett had long known, though he didn't much like to admit it, that God's world and the better part of daily life were full of mysteries known only to women.

I'd forgotten how trees full of bird sounds made you sense the world differently: that life didn't just stop at eye level.