Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

People love to believe in danger, as long as it's you in harm's way, and them saying bless your heart.

I don't know how you go on, but I really hope you'll keep doing it. That you won't give up esperanza. I thought of that last night. Esperanza is all you get, no second chances. What you have to do is try and think of reasons to stick it out.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.

There will never be another Frida.

A hundred different paths may lighten the world's load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees.

It's in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.

How does an artist learn enough about life to fill a thimble? Soli, I'm going to tell you. He needs to go rub his soul against life. ...

Always we walk each other home. And always we walk some of it alone.

The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes

Sophie's mother had to leave her dad, to get sober. She says as long as you're living with an addict, you're addicted.

Children - even when they have endured the unthinkable - have a gift for divining the moment when the grown-ups really need to lighten up.

Priests were illegal, saying the mass was illegal, all banned by the Revolution.

You from out of town?" he asked after a while, eying my car. "No," I said. "I go to Kentucky every year to get my license plate." I didn't like his looks.

One percent of the brotherhood has their hands on most of the bread. They own the country, their god is the free market, and most people are so unhorrified they won't even question the system. If it makes a profit, that's the definition of good. If it grows, you have to stand back and let it. The free market has exactly the same morality as a cancer cell.

The girl was compulsively honest. In earlier years, Willa's every attempt to teach her the artful evasion known as "tact" would get shot down with "Mom, that's lying!" And Tig remained the child who announced when opening gifts at birthday parties, "Thanks, Grandma, I have one of these already and I don't really like it.

The jacaranda in the courtyard has put on its bloom. This purple can't be ignored, it's like a tree singing. The walk down Londres Street to the market is a concert: the small jacaranda on the the corner hums the tuning note, then all others in the lane join in.

Willa wondered how many tuition dollars they'd invested in this conversation, and whether she could get a refund; she wished they would all shut up and eat.

For a minute the Sun came out, while it was snowing. People say that means the devil is beating his wife.

A taste for better stuff is cultivated only through experience.

In my first draft every sentence I put down is to advance the story. Each subsequent draft - the 3rd, the 7th, the 27th - is trying to turn each of those sentences into a poem.

All knowledge measured, first and last, by one's allegiance to the teacher.

People buying apples and green beans usually have some degree of joy in their hearts.

In our darkest hours we may find comfort in the age-old slogan from the resistance movement, declaring that we shall not be moved. But we need to finish that sentence. Moved from where? Are we anchoring to the best of what we've believed in, throughout our history, or merely to an angry new mode of self-preservation? The American moral high ground can't possibly be an isolated mountaintop from which we refuse to learn anything at all to protect ourselves from monstrous losses.

As the storm moved closer it broke into hundreds of pieces so that the rain fell here and there from the high clouds in long, curving gray plumes. It looked like maybe fifty or sixty fires scattered over the city, except that the tall, smoky columns were flowing in reverse.