Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.

The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business...I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.

Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.

Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.

If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.

He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.

When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.

I look at my four boys, who are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether.

I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.

There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.

Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don't know what I'm looking for. I just do it.

it's the thing you fear most that walks beside you all the time.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.

Codi: "So you think we all just have animal dreams. We can't think of anything to dream except our ordinary lives." Loyd: "Only if you have an ordinary life. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life."

There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.