Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

You don't ask questions of an attic

Don't dare presume there's shame in the lot of a woman who carries on.

The best artifact was the calendar of the ancients, a great carved piece of stone as big as a kitchen, circular, bolted to the wall like a giant clock. In the center was an angry face looking out, as if he'd come through that stone from some other place to have a look at us, and not very pleased about it.

I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another.

And I have no idea how to be kind to myself. Living, as a general enterprise, seems unkind beyond belief.

Good people don't give up on the ones they love.

My future was mapped in negatives. Next year, I could be anywhere but here.

Sometimes that happens. Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them," she said. "It works out.

It was pretty clear there would be no stopping the Bullhorn, or someone like him. Here was the earthquake, the fire, flood, and melting permafrost, with everyone still grabbing for bricks to put in their pockets rather than walking out of the wreck and looking for light

There seemed to be no end to the things that could be hiding, waiting it out, right where you thought you could see it all.

I had just dropped out of medicine in my first year of residency, a few months shy of becoming a licensed M.D. I'd discovered there was something serious, mainly a matter of nerve and perhaps empathy, that stood in my way.

I looked hard out the window and understood suddenly that what I saw was full of color. A watercolor wash of summer light lay on the Catalina Mountains. The end of a depression is that clear: it's as if you have been living underwater, but never realized it until you came up for air.

If people played their channels right, they could be spared from disagreement for the length of their natural lives. Finally she got it. The need for so many channels.

It's the worst of bad manners to ridicule the small gesture...Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren't trivial. Ultimately they will, or won't, add up to having been the thing that mattered.

She kept her ears permanently tuned to the chicken voices outside, so knew immediately when a coyote had crept into the yard, and barreled screaming for the front door before the rest of us had a clue. (I don't know about the coyote, but I nearly needed CPR.) These hens owed their lives and eggs to Lily, there was no question.

Several studies, including research done by Allison Byrum of the American Chemical Society, have shown fruits and vegetables grown without pesticides and herbicides to contain 50 to 60 percent more antioxidants than their sprayed counterparts.

How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don't respect his work?

My heart had grown older, with more in it to break.

The flatness was stultifying. She wouldn't say this aloud because in light of other worries it seemed self-indulgent, but Willa missed mountains. Missed them hard, with the psychic equivalent of a toothache.

There is not justice in this world. Father, forgive me wherever you are, but this world has brought one vile abomination after another down on the heads of the gentle, and I'll not live to see the meek inherit anything.

Cars with flames painted on the hood might get more speeding tickets. Are the flames making the car go fast? No. Certain things just go together. And when they do, they are correlated. It is the darling of all human errors to assume, without proper testing, that one is the cause of the other.

They rock against each other, holding on, and the birds in the forest raise their voices to drown out the secret of creation.

The women of his family would become one with the earth's creatures only by pressing the bones of whales against their rib cages until breathless.

You could allow a gentleman the privacy of his piss.