Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

But this boy in a French or British factory, standing in his leather overall welding the casing on a metal bomb; what can he see? That thing will fly through the air, fall hundreds of miles away, and kill boys in leather overalls in a German factory. the reports will roar victory or defeat, and boys will never know how alike their lives have been.

What I'm saying is nobody feels sorry for anybody anymore, nobody even pretends they do. Not even the President. It's like it's become unpatriotic.

He's legitimizing personal greed as the principal religion of our country.

You learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist history rather than a spectator Father Fernando Cardenal

Let's go take a walk down to the blue hole. You need to look at some water.

A red-tailed hawk rose high on an air current, calling out shrill, sequential rasps of raptor joy. She scanned the sky for another one. Usually when they spoke like that, they were mating. Once she'd seen a pair of them coupling on the wing, grappling and clutching each other and tumbling curve-winged through the air in hundred-foot death dives that made her gasp, though always they uncoupled and sailed outward and up again just before they were bashed to death in senseless passion.

So much energy squandered in the unwinnable war waged by woman against the life-form she is.

A delicate business, telling the truth. So long as Landis writes a happier falsehood for these men to tell themselves, they can believe in opportunity. They are the nearly rich

The whole idea of the sermon was how people connect up in various ways, seen and unseen, and that Mr. Peg had tied a lot of knots in the big minnow seine that keeps us all together. Dead but still here, in other words. That's what killed me the worst.

El tiempo cura y nos mata. Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

She climbs down and pours half an inch of Jim Beam into a Bengals mug that came free with a tank of gas. Alice would just as soon get her teeth cleaned as watch the Bengals. That's the price of staying around when your heart's not in it, she thinks. You get to be cheerleader for a sport you never chose.

rainy day, which this was, still yet and always.

It's a fact of our culture that the loudest mouths get the most airplay, and the loudmouths are saying that in times of crisis it's treasonous to question our leaders.

Here comes Moses tromping down off Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

But from here on in I'm your Ma, and that means I love you the most. Forever

There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.  

What we suffered in our lives we went through together, but somehow we came out different doors, on different ground levels.

Sex will get you through times with no money better than money will get you through times with no sex.

In Congo, a slashed jungle quickly becomes a field of flowers, and scars become the ornaments of a particular face. Call it oppression, complicity, stupefaction, call it what you like, it doesn't matter. Africa swallowed the conqueror's music and sang a new song of her own.

If you ask me, that's reason enough to keep a kitchen at the center of a family's life, as a place to understand favorite foods as processes, not just products.

What kind of weirdo makes cheese? It's too hard to imagine, too homespun, too something. We're so alienated from the creation of even ordinary things we eat or use, each one seems to need its own public relations team to calm the American subservience to hurry and bring us back around to doing a thing ourselves, at home.

Roscoe and his friends are studying the heat of the fire and the level of oil in the pot with the attitude men take on occasions like this, feeling the weight of their supervisory powers. Sugar smiles. A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn't, this world would end at once.

My thoughts kept straying onto random paths...hoping to get lost in a thicket.