Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

I wondered if DSS had anything like Step 9, where you eventually have to apologize to all the kids you've screwed over.

I'll never get over my grappling for balance, never stop believing life is going to be fair , the minute we can clear up all these mistakes of the temporarily misguided.

To live is to be marked, to live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.

It's funny how people don't give that much thought to what kids want, as long as they're being quiet.

The part of my soul that is driven to make stories is a fierce thing, like a ferret: long, sleek, incapable of sleep, it digs and bites through all I know of the world.

The way I see it, a person isn't nothing more than a scarecrow... The only difference between one that stands up good and one that blows over is what kind of a stick they're stuck up there on.

You can't just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back.

To stomp about the world ignoring cultural differences is arrogant, to be sure, but perhaps there is another kind of arrogance in the presumption that we may ever really build a faultless bridge from one shore to another, or even know where the mist has ceded to landfall.

In Bobby Ogle's version of heaven everyone would wind up in one place, criminals and Muslims included.

To stand in the clear light of day, you once said. Unsheltered.

we consume. I think that's just how we have to be." "Of course you think that. When everybody around you thinks the same way, you can't even see what you're believing in.

No one seemed to realize calculating sums requires only the most basic machinery and good concentration. Poetry is far more difficult. And palindromes, with their perfect, satisfying taste: Draw a level award! Yet it is always the thin gray grocery sums that make an impression.

Here, all we can ever be is everything we've been.

Crisis is opportunity.

About how your kids aren't really yours, they're just these people that you try to keep an eye on, and hope you'll all grow up someday to like each other and still be in one piece.

The rule of fishes is the same as the rule of people: if the shark comes, they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten. They share a single jumpy heart that drives them to move all together, running away from danger just before it arrives. Somehow they know. Underneath

An animal is the sum of its behaviors, its community dynamics. Not just the physical body.

I knew it was only shadow and the angle of the sun, but still it's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story...

There's people I love. But there's so many other kinds of love, too. And people act so hateful to every kind but their own.

Concentrating on local foods means thinking of fruit invariably as the product of an orchard, and winter squash as the fruit of an early-winter farm. It's a strategy that will keep grocery money in the neighborhood, where it gets recycled into your own school system and local businesses. The green spaces surrounding your town stay green, and farmers who live nearby get to grow more food next year, for you.

With these startling honesties glinting up at us from history's broken mirror, it strikes me that this is worth shouting from the rooftops: We could be wrong this time, again. The enemy may not be exactly what we think. It may be a force that resides in many quarters, including inside our skin, in our very words, the questions we frame, the things we love most, the things we can't live without. Our greatest dread may be our salvation.

OxyContin, God's gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself.

Isn't it crazy? Rich people in the United States don't even know how to use money properly.