Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

Parenting is something that happens mostly while you're thinking of something else.

There must be transients in the bird world too, rumple-feathered outcasts that naturally seek out each other's company in inferior and dying trees.

We are bodies, sometimes with dreams and always with desires.

The clock gulps softly, eating second whole while she waits...

He said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and people would still vote for him. Am I dreaming this? Willa asked. No. No. He said that. It couldn't have been more than a week ago. Apparently he was right. Iano, nobody gets away with murder. You can't behave like a madman when you're running for public office. That kind of trash talk is supposed to end careers.

Questioning our government's actions does not violate the principles of liberty, equality, and freedom of speech; it exercises them, and by exercise we grow stronger. I have read enough of Thomas Jefferson to feel sure

He got born in the historical moment of no more free lunch. Friends will probably count more than money, because wanting too much stuff is going to be toxic.

While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born.

We were not made for this killing thing, I swear. Back up. Big mistake.

I've just fallen on some bad luck and landed jelly side down.

Because DSS pay is basically the fuck-you peanut butter sandwich type of paycheck. That's what the big world thinks it's worth, to save white-trash orphans.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

This was a living flow, like a pulse through veins, with the cells bursting and renewing themselves as they went. The sudden vision filled her with strong emotions that embarrassed her, for fear of breaking into sobs as she had in front of her in-laws that day when the butterflies enveloped her. How was that even normal, to cry over insects?

According to her, if he hasn't been dead twenty years, he isn't history.

She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.

The purpose of art is to elevate the spirit or to pay a surgeon's bill. Or both. It can help a person remember or forget.

Being a peacock is not the only way to hide yourself, Frida. A pigeon can hide.

Don't you miss it, any of it?' … 'I couldn't say.' She thought about it. 'Not cars or electric lights, not movies. Books I can get if I ask. But walking around in a library, putting my hands on books I never knew about, that I miss. Any thing else, I don't know.

Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony. If I'd known what marriage was going to be like, well, heck, I probably would have tied all those hope-chest linens together into a rope and hung myself from a tree!

It was his habit, when he rewrote anything, to shed himself of all earlier versions. He kept a clean house.

The sloped desert plain that lay between us and the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds.

But other people fast or walk long pilgrimages to honor the spirit of what they believe makes our world whole and lovely. If we gardeners can, in the same spirit, put our heels to the shovel, kneel before a trench holding tender roots, and then wait three years for an edible incarnation of the spring equinox, who's to make the call between ridiculous and reverent?

He's not from here, that's the thing, Cub said. Just because he's the outsider, he has no say? Should we not read books, then, or listen to nobody outside this county? Where's that going to leave us?

Without shelter, we stand in daylight.