Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

I'm always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves.

Shoes, then, sliding me across the floor to greet the day. Dreaming of coffee. I'm afraid I didn't miss the physical presence of my husband in his absences as much as I missed coffee.

On Sunday morning I put on jeans, changed into a denim dress, then back into jeans again, feeling stupid. I can get into a mood where I annoy myself to no end. At the moment when I got completely fed up and stopped caring, I had on jeans and a white cotton shirt and silver earrings, so that's what I wore. And yes, I'll admit it, nice underwear.

Living in a holler, the sun gets around to you late in the day, and leaves you early.

Remember how we use to pray to get invited to birthday parties? And they only asked us because we were so grateful we'd do anything, stay late and help the mothers wash the cake pans. I'm still that girl, flattered to death if somebody wants me around.

When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.

Her name, he says like the Lord's taken in vain. Sometimes he says Mexico, and the word has nothing in it at all. A wall with no colors painted on it.

A disappointed-looking Jesus eyed her from the wall...Look, look, her steps called out, here is a red headed sinner on the move.

The color brown, I realized, is anything but nondescript. It comes in as many hues as there are colors of earth, with is commonly presumed infinite.

Beautiful people liked to claim looks didn't matter, while throwing that currency around like novice bank robbers.

She laid the side of her face against his frail old heart, where the pink shell of her ear could capture whatever song it had left.

A city is the weirdest, loneliest thing.

Maggot calmed me down by explaining Bible stories were a category of superhero comic. Not to be confused with real life.

When I'm in a blue mood, I head for the kitchen. I turn the pages of my favorite cookbooks, summoning the prospective joyful noise of a shared meal. I stand over a bubbling soup, close my eyes, and inhale. From the ground up, everything about nourishment steadies my soul.

The guys in charge of everything right now are so old. They really are, Mom. Older than you. They figured out the meaning of life in, I guess, the nineteen fifties and sixties. When it looked like there would always be plenty of everything. And they're applying that to now. It's just so ridiculous.

Outside in the sun the Holy Mother stood on her pedestal in the garden, sorry but unsympathetic. The usual position of mothers.

After a while Estevan said, "What I really hate is not belonging in any place. To be unwanted everywhere.

Which makes you wonder, are they really speaking real words or do little kids just start out naturally understanding each other before the prime of life sets in?

mountains. They stand at every view, like a mother offering a blanket in which to wrap everyday life and shelter it from useless. dreads. In june they are walls of white rhodendron blossom. In autumn the forests set themselves afflame with color. Even winter has its icy charms.

When he marched to the altar, all the women in smart hats leaned away from the aisle, their long strands of pearls all swaying to one side as if the deck of a ship listed beneath them.

But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them.

Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes," he still loves to say, as often as possible. "It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.

So Noah cursed all Ham's children to be slaves forever and ever. That's how come them to turn out dark