Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, There now, hang on, you'll get over it. Sadness is more or less like a head cold—with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer. Cynthia

Moths must fly to his flame and perish gladly.

But at school the next day in my new clothes I still felt horrible. Not even proud. Embarrassed honestly, because nothing would change. Now they'd all think I was just that much more pitiful, because of trying. Loser is a cliff. Once you've gone over, you're over.

The longer the sauce cooks, the spicier it gets.

I read in a book that they cut off the workers' hands if they hadn't collected enough rubber by the end of the day. The Belgian foremen would bring baskets full of brown hands back to the boss, piled up like a mess of fish. Could this be true of civilized white Christians?

Cat, this is America, they let anybody vote. Crooks, wigs, even cookies like us. Dogs and cats, probably. Don't take Fido to the polls, he might cancel you out.

Brain of a deer tick, but that's not something to hold against a running back.

A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children. This is what we're meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the toothbrushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don't pertain.

The human person cannot face up to a bad outcome, that's just the deal.

There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad...Sadness is more or less like a head cold -- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

Everything, she wanted to scream at him, was a question of safety. All human endeavor bent itself to the same lost cause. Being kept inside a pumpkin shell your whole life was no guarantee against getting flung into space.

A life was a life. She'd been orphaned at an age to internalize death as poor material for a joke. And likewise, salvation.

We drove around with "Proud Tobacco Farmer" stickers on our trucks till they peeled and faded along with our good health and dreams of greatness. If you're standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight.

my books only for the dear person who lies awake reading in bed until page last, then lets the open book fall gently on her face, to touch her smile or drink her tears.

Her every possession was either unbreakable, or broken.

Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittlebush in a dry wind.

Somebody one time gave me the one where the boy is hateful and sent to bed with no supper, and in his head he's a monster and goes to this island where it's all wild monsters like him, seriously ticked off, making their wild rumpus.

So that was me promising Emmy that life is to be trusted. I knew better. I should have let her go with her gut: Never get back on the horse, because it's going to throw you every damn chance it gets. Then maybe she'd have been wise to the shit that came for her later on, and maybe it would have turned out better.

that thing of being loved automatically, Jesus on your side.

No matter what affronts of youthful insolence he had to face in his day, he'd still have that: he was a man taken care of by a woman.

Like every boy in Lee County I was raised to be a proud mule in a world that has scant use for mules.

The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. What I want is almost so simple I can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.

You get used to it, not in the good way, to the extent of the entire world oftentimes feeling like a place where you weren't invited. If you've been here, you know. If not, must be nice.

Cooking is the great divide between good eating and bad. The gains are quantifiable. Cooking and eating at home - even with quality ingredients - costs pennies on the dollar compared with meals prepared by a restaurant or factory.