Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

We're genetically predisposed toward certain behaviors that we've collectively decided are unhelpful; adultery and racism are possible examples. With reasonable success, we mitigate those impulses through civil codes, religious rituals, maternal warnings—the whole bag of tricks we call culture.

The final stages of grief. Dellarobia felt an entirely new form of panic as she watched her son love nature so expectantly, wondering if he might be racing toward a future like some complicated sand castle that was crumbling under the tide. She didn't know how scientists bore such knowledge. People had to manage terrible truths.

Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Adah inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.

But a spontaneous traveler inevitably will end up with the tummy gauge suddenly on empty, in some place where cuisine is not really the point: a museum cafeteria, or late-night snack bar across from the concert hall. Eating establishments where cuisine isn't the point—is that a strange notion?

don't look for money to buy your life back

Twenty pounds of tomatoes will cook down into a pot of tomato sauce that fits into five one-quart freezer boxes, good for one family meal each. (Be warned, the fragrance of your kitchen will cause innocent bystanders to want to marry you.)

One thing I learned from Mr. Armstrong while striving heartily to remain uneducated: a good story doesn't just copy life, it pushes back on it. It's why guys like Chartrain wear their clothes too big and their teeth edged with gold, why Mr. Dick puts words on kites and sends them to the sun. It's why I draw what I draw.

Mom had promised to stay clean as long as I was a good enough son to make it worth her while.

Killing is a culturally loaded term, for most of us inextricably tied up with some version of a command that begins, "Thou shalt not." Every faith has it. And for all but perhaps the Jainists of India, that command is absolutely conditional. We know it does not refer to mosquitoes.

might call it a great passion. When the true name of what we're dealing with is greed, or lust. We all have the special talent of believing in a falsehood, and believing it devoutly, when we want it to be true.

It ran deeper than that. I'd lost what there was to lose: first my mother and then my baby. Nothing you love will stay. Hallie could call that attitude a crutch, but she didn't know, she hadn't loved and lost so deeply. As Loyd said, she'd never been born—not into life as I knew it. Hallie could still risk everything.

We have the illusion of consumer freedom, but we've sacrificed our community life for the pleasure of purchasing lots of cheap stuff. We often have the form of liberty, but not the substance

But I kept my mouth shut. It's safer knowing more about people than they know about you.

Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure. Why resist that?

was after they discovered the world was round. I'm not scared of big words." "I didn't say you were." "You did, too! 'I realize you're no scientist, Miss Rawley

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 hit me pretty hard, how there's no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning.

Of course the scientist's position is subordinate. Our task is to make our fussy natures invisible against the mechanisms of the universe. Truth is not ours to find within, but to search out. We study the known world in order to recognize the remarkable.

When you were a child planting lilacs here with your mother, did you imagine the same honeyed scent, eight years later, waking someone like me in this house... or that you would finally show me hot to fall in love with the time on my hands, to plant flowers to outlive me?

I was born to wish for more than I can have.

First, I got myself born.

I've seen many a small life meet its doom at the end of a beak in our yard, not just beetles and worms but salamanders and wild-eyed frogs. (The "free-range vegetarian hens" testimony on an egg-carton label is perjury, unless someone's trained them with little shock collars.)

Well, but it's criminal negligence, really. These kids have to grow up and run things. Larger things than a ball field, I mean. What kind of world will they really be able to make?

You know what really gets me?" I asked him. "How people call you 'illegals.' That just pisses me off, I don't know how you can stand it. A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal?