Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

Oh, whatever would I do without my child-progeny sister to tell me what to do. Prodigy, I corrected.

from an entry by her daughter Camille] ...research published fifteen years ago in the New England Journal of Medicine: eggs from chickens that ranged freely on grass have about half the cholesterol of factory-farmed eggs, and it's mostly HDL, the cholesterol that's good for you. They also have more vitamin E, beta-carotene and omega-3 fatty acids than their cooped-up counterparts.

I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it's a feeling you keep having, even after that's no longer a place anymore. Probably if they dropped a bomb and there wasn't any food left on the planet, you'd still keep feeling hungry too.

The traffic was moving about the speed of a government

All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

The sting of a fly, the Congolese say, can launch the end of the world. How simply things begin.

Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.

There but for the grace of serotonin go the rest of us.

If wishes were horses, like they say. We'd all have different shit to shovel.

always tried to be positive with her, although I'd learned

All that hurry can blur the truth that life is a zero-sum equation. Every minute I save will get used on something else, possibly no more sublime than staring at the newel post trying to remember what I just ran upstairs for.

They count that as your birthday -- the day your mother gets up. Not the day you were born? Not the day you came out. They count the mother getting better as all part of the birth.

If you can't live by the laws the LORD God made for the world, they'll go into effect regardless.

Tig was a unique element with all valences open.

Thomas Jefferson presumed on the basis of colonial experience that farming and democracy are intimately connected. Cultivation of land meets the needs of the farmer, the neighbors, and the community, and and keeps people independent from domineering centralized powers. In Jefferson's time, [George] was the king. In ours, it's multinational corporations.

the houses all seemed a little senile, with arthritc hinges and window screens hanging at embarrassing angles.

Except for her weak foundation. The ruin of many a girl, I guess.

Everyone wants the tallest tree to fall

I found the right (Valentine) card to send her. On the cover there were hearts, and it said, Here's hoping you'll soon have something big and strong around the house to open those tight jar lids. Inside was a picture of a pipe wrench.

When people run for their lives they frequently neglect to bring along their file cabinets of evidence," she said. Mattie wasn't often bitter but when she was, she was. I didn't want to believe the world could be so unjust. But of course it was right there in front of my nose.

Thatcher thought Mary was not invisible, but as free as any woman could be. And in the grip of fresh discoveries, always.

If a friend had a coronary scare and finally started exercising three days a week, who would hound him about the other four days? It's the worst of bad manners—and self-protection, I think, in a nervously cynical society—to ridicule the small gesture.

The first to fall in any war are forgotten.

Conquest and liberation and democracy and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.