Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

I was struck with how full a silence could be: a Carolina wren sang from the eave of the shed; cedar waxwings carried on whispery bickerings up in the cherry; a mockingbird did an odd jerky dance, as if seized by the bird spirit, out on the driveway. The pea bowl rang like an insistent bell as we tossed in our peas.

The pale-skinned boy stood shivering in water up to his waist, thinking these were the most awful words in any language: You will be surprised. The moment when everything is about to change.

The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures.

She was well accustomed to watching Yankee brains grind their gears, attempting to reconcile a hillbilly accent with signs of a serious education.

Borders crumble; they won't hold together on their own; we have to shore them up constantly. They are fortified and patrolled by armed guards, these fences that divide a party of elegant diners on one side from the children on the other whose thin legs curve like wishbones, whose large eyes peer through the barbed wire at so much food—there is no wall high enough to make good in such a neighborhood. For this, of course, is what the fences divide.

Ugly as homemade sin.

To have been made the creatures we are is a marvel. If the process required millennia rather than seven days, how can it be any less sublime?

It hit me pretty hard, how there's no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning. People will keep on wanting what they want, and you're on your own.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that current food production can sustain world food needs even for the 8 billion people who are projected to inhabit the planet in 2030. This will hold even with anticipated increases in meat consumption, and without adding genetically modified crops.

Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behavior in children, and medicate it in adults? That's so random. It's like this whole shady setup.

south, moving slowly. It looked something like a huge blue-gray shower curtain being drawn along by the hand of God. You could just barely see through it, enough to make

What other man, ever again, would just do as she commanded, no questions asked? She felt overwhelmed with love and loss and nostalgia for this bond that was not even yet in her past

The elder daughter looks up, her pale eyes steady. "But we are here, Papa." "Yes, you are." "Why don't you want us?" "Oh, God, I do." He kneels down and takes them both in his arms and pulls them against his chest. He understands for the first time in his life that love weighs nothing. Oh God, his girls are as light as birds.

SUNRISE TANTALIZE, evil eyes hypnotize:

The larger the corporation, the more distant its motives are apt to be from the original spirit of organic farming—and the farther the products will likely be shipped to buyers who will smile at the happy farm picture on the package, and never be the wiser.

I am looking for the door to another world. I've waited thousands of years. Take me.

There will always be those that look down on your station in life and call it a sty, but if you get in there and wallow, that's on you.

The moral of his story was how you never know the size of hurt that's in people's hearts, or what they're liable to do about it, given the chance.

But if a story has all the elements, it will be legend around here, where we love our neighbors so much we can't stop talking about them.

Kids up there evidently had brains coming out their ears, to the extent of needing to meet up with other kids for brain-to-brain combat.

Living takes life. But it can be thoughtful. A little bit humble about the necessity, maybe. You can consider the costs of your various choices.

No rational guidelines existed for comparing youthful freedom with the heart-enlarging earthquake of family life.

Emmy said Kent and June didn't use weapons, just mouths, both parties packing serious heat in that department. Kent was a yeller, but mouthwise, June was an AR-15. Instant reload, engineered to kill.

Love. But the pure kind of love. I don't think that comes very often. Most of us are ordinary. If we do anything great, it's only so we'll be loved ourselves. Maybey just for ten minutes.