Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

Was this what they meant by hot flashes? But they didn't feel hot. Her body felt full and heavy and slow and human and absent somehow, just a weight to be carried forward without its enthusiastic cycles of fertility and rest, the crests and valleys she had never realized she counted on so much. Dead weight? Was that what she was now; an obsolete female biding its time until death?

She never wore a watch, and for this she didn't need one.

But honestly, XARrizZON! It sounds like strangling. What kind of a name is that?" "It was a president, señora." "Of what? Some place where they don't have any oxygen?" "Of the United States." "As I said.

She said don't ever be pregnant during the lead-up to Halloween because it will put you off candy corn for life. I told her thanks for the advice.

The way he talked sounded part Yankee, part foreign, like one of those friendly Irish policeman in the old movies: Ouch, mind you!

Trust the road. Because nobody stays, in the long run you're on your own with your ghosts. You're the ship and they're the bottle.

our best task is to move forward without insisting others slide backward.

the useful illusion that everything would be fine. It amazed her now to watch people walking through life with their ludicrous trust.

shambles in her sternum.

I don't know where to start, Lou Ann," I told her. "There's just so damn much ugliness. Everywhere you look, some big guy kicking some little person when they're down—look what they do to those people at Mattie's. To hell with them, people say, let them die, it was their fault in the first place for being poor or in trouble, or for not being white, or whatever, how dare they try to come to this country.

It's a relief to share the uncomplicated affection that has passed between people and their dogs for thousands of years.

is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.

We're chalk and cheese. Somebody ought to do a study on us, if they want to know how kids in the same family can turn out totally different.

Aunts standing close in the kitchen llike cigaretts in the pack, uncles splayed on furniture like butts in the ashtray.

Over the phone, her laughter sounded like a warm bath.

The wounds of this ruptured nation lie open and ugly.

It wasn't all a waste," she told him over and over, holding on. Some things they got right, she was sure of that. The children. And for all the rest they wept, a merged keening that felt bottomless. For the years and years of things that didn't exist, fantasies of flight where there was no flight. Nothing, really, but walking away on your own two feet. She felt tears frozen on her face.

Sadness is more or less like a head cold—with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

On the hill behind her crows flew one by one into the bare trees, arranging their dark blots in the scrim of branches and adding their warnings to the drear sounds of this day. Gone, gone, they rasped. Here was a dead world learning to speak in dissonant, unbearable sounds.

you always write about individualism vs. community, and that you see independence as stupidity and instead celebrate dependency.

I loved the time spent with him, but felt in some other chamber of my heart that it was time wasted. That I ought to be doing something else while there was time.

This is all going to scare us to death," she said. "You and me. But we're still going to have to do it.

It's also interesting how it's hard to be depressed around a three-year-old, if you're paying attention. After a while, whatever you're mooning about begins to seem like some elaborate adult invention.

Damn April to hell, I could be done with that one. November also. Birthdays, Christmas, dogwoods and redbuds, even football season. Live long enough, and all the things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. the wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.