Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

Modern US consumers now get to taste less than 1 percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago. Those old-timers now lurk only in backyard gardens and on farms that specialize in direct sales--if they survive at all. Many heirlooms have been lost entirely.

Finally Cub said, They don't call it global weirding. I know. But I think that's actually the idea. Cub shook his head. Weather is the Lord's business.

that mothers' and daughters' hearts can be crushed so repeatedly without learning to defend themselves.

GM [genetically modified] plants are virtually everywhere in the US food chain, but don't have to be labeled, and aren't. Industry lobbyists intend to keep it that way.

I think maybe it is true that the idle mind is the Devil's workshop.

When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.

Mom is losing, no doubt, because our vegetables have come to lack two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. Storage and transport take predictable tolls on the volatile plant compounds that subtly add up to taste and food value. Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to decrease palatability. Bizarre as it seems, we've accepted a tradeoff that amounts to: Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of its former self.

Two dead wasps lay on the sill with their heads close together like a tiny murder-suicide.

I would make one of Aunt June as Wonder Nurse, putting a new heart back inside a boy that had his own torn out.

the blossom of our family, like one of those miraculous fruit trees that taps into an invisible vein of nurture and bears radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on living.

Why does a person spend money on a stamp to spout bile at a stranger?

The Pueblo story is that everyone started out underground. People and animals, everything. And then the badger dug a hole and let everybody out. They climbed out the hole and from then on they lived on top of the ground. When they die they go back under. […] 'I always try to think of it that way,' he said, after a minute. "He had a big adventure up here, and then went home.

I have long relied on the comforts of martyrdom.

Now, see, that's why everybody wants Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy.' Dovey's phone buzzed, and she laughed, ignoring it. 'The trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn't agree with you, all that's left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.

Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,' he said. 'We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.

Some of life's greatest calls were answered not by the head but by the body.

There's nothing like living as a refugee in one's own country to turn a generous soul into a hard little fist.

As a dinner guest I gratefully eat just about anything that's set before me, because graciousness among friends is dearer to me than any other agenda.

In almost thirty years of walking around on the grass of the world, she couldn't recall having spent two minutes alone with a butterfly.

Carlo is safe because I don't really love him that much. If he stopped wanting me around one day, it wouldn't be so terrible. I wouldn't die. Hallie, I realize how that sounds. I feel small and ridiculous and hemmed in on every side by the need to be safe. All I want is to be like you, to walk into a country of chickens and land mines and call that home, and have it be home. How do you just charge ahead, always doing the right thing, even if you have to do it alone with people staring?

We cater to the better class of gentile clientele. We reserve the right to decline service to anyone we deem to be incompatible.

How could two people get the same set of parts and make such different constructions? But then, there was rising. That had to be taken into account. What could a doormat rear but a pair of boots?

War is the supreme mathematics problem. It strains our skulls, yet we work out the sums, believing we have pressed the most monstrous quantities into a balanced equation

You knew me well enough to find me here,' she said. And his scent burst onto her brain like a rain of lights, and his voice reached across the distance without words: 'I've always known you that well.' He wrapped her in his softness, touched her face with the movement of trees and the odor of wild water over stones, dissolving her need in the confidence of his embrace.