Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

It made no sense, a lifespan of a few weeks did not add up to an annual migration of many thousand miles. How did they learn where to go?

Religion has no place in the science classroom, where it may abridge students' opportunities to learn the methods, discoveries, and explanatory hypotheses of science. Rather, its place is in the hearts of the men and women who study and then practice scientific exploration. Ethics can't influence the outcome of an experiment, but they can serve as a useful adjunct to the questions that get asked in the first place, and to the applications thereafter.

It is in his absence I prosper.

When they are pushed down long enough they will rise up. If they bite you, they are trying to fix things in the only way they know.

from an entry by her daughter Camille] Organic produce actually delivers more nutritional bang for the buck. These fruits and vegetables are tougher creatures than those labeled conventional, precisely because they've had to fight off predators themselves.

if you look hard enough you can always see reasons, but you'll go crazy if you think it's all punishment for your sins.

I knew exactly what I should have said: Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.

I'm out of the habit. I've spent years trying not to want. Just, you know, as an endeavor, like quitting smoking.

It only we could recover faith in a seed - and in all the other complicated marvels that can't fit in a sound bite. Then we humans might truly know the glory of knowing our place.

The forest eats itself and lives forever.

Hope it an unbearably precious thing, worth its weight in feathers. If that's too much to think about, best to tuck it in a pocket anyway, and make it a habit.

She told him television was a bad influence. Probably she was right. Like those white birds he's been seeing outside the window, it flashes its wings and promises whatever you want, even before you knew you wanted it.

For God's sake, man," Ovid nearly shouted, "the damn globe is catching fire, and the islands are drowning. The evidence is staring them in the face.

Iano ordered her back to Ivins to finish her degree in biology. Willa wondered when he would notice Tig was immune to his directives. Tig informed her parents she refused to take out bank loans, with tuition exchange no longer an option, and anyway she'd already learned more than she wanted to know about a ravaged biosphere. The latter was no news to Willa, who'd seen how the girl always took the truth of human selfishness harder than any of her friends, even the history majors.

Until that morning when we all went to the riverbank, I still believed Mother would take Leah, not me. Leah who, even in her malarial stupor, rushed forward to crouch with the battery in the canoe and counter its odd tilt. I was outshone was usual by her heroism. But as we watched that pirogue drift away across the Kwenge, Mother gripped my hand so tightly I understood that I had been chosen. She would drag me out of Africa if it was her last living act as a mother. I think probably it was.

Were the beaux less generous over time? Her assets less marketable? If she had lived to be old, would she have resided in a teacup, to be sipped at intervals beneath some gray moustache?

Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony. Well, I put up with him anyway.

I don't know, Magda says, Seems like that's just how it is with you and me. We're like islands on the moon.

A storm was coming up from the south, moving slowly. It looked something like a huge blue-gray shower curtain being drawn along by the hand of God.

Heroes may be less than heroic, while the common man saves the day.

because it takes your sleeping self years to catch up to where you really are. Pay attention to your dreams: when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness.

You can fool history sometimes, but you can't fool the memory of your intimates.

There are Christians, and there are Christians.

First thing in the morning, last thing at night, whenever a fight with Tig left her in pieces, it had been her mother who put Willa back together. When someone mattered like that, you didn't lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.