Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

That's a tarantula,' he said. 'You got to watch out for them suckers. They can jump four feet. If they get you, you go crazy. It's a special kind of poison' This I didn't believe. I never could figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a big dangerous deal. I mean, we've got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don't we?

They are all for the great captain, while he indentures them and eats their souls and property. Somehow he gets them to side against their own.

I don't see why you're not just going for this.' Dovey looked her in the eyes, in the mirror. 'You are a rocket. You go for thing, Dellarobia. That is you. When did you ever not?' Dellarobia shut her eyes. 'When there was nothing out there to land on, I guess.' 'Now, see,' Dovey clucked, 'that's a woman thing. Men and kids get to just light out and fly, without even worrying about what comes next.

You just read your books and go on a hundred miles away, You ignore me.

That's high school for you, a bevy of people unfit for adult life encounters in any form.

As to the career of avoiding making enemies. You can't dig any burrow deep enough. Might as well stand and look them in the eye.

Don't count on it. There's a lot of white folks out there hanging on to their God-given right to look down on some other class of people

The hopeless wishes that won't quit stalking you: some perfect words you think you could say to somebody to make them see you, and love you, and stay. Or could say to your mirror, same reason.

It 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.

Really it's just down to a handful of guys piling up everything they can grab and sitting on top of it. And a million poor jerks like Papu still hoping they can get into the club. How long can that last? Five or six more years?

it's not just girls that end up inside four walls of hate and knuckles for breakfast, it can be anybody. Hate comes along and lays out the damn doormat and there you are.

But Coach and I were twelve-step brothers, there's a code. I'd showed up.

One way of surviving heartache is to stay busy. Making something right in at least one tiny corner of the vast house of wrongs...

she believed material desires were toxic.

Tommy, though. Smart as hell, he could think himself out of any hole, but then would crawl back into it and sit there. It was like he chose the shit end of the stick, so nobody else would get it. A hard thing to watch.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life

After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends. —WALLACE STEVENS, "The Well Dressed Man with a Beard

First they would stagger, then grow competent, and then forget the difficulty altogether while thinking of other things, and that was survival.

Most people no longer believe that buying sneakers made in Asian sweatshops is a kindness to those child laborers. Farming is similar. In every country on earth, the most human scenario for farmers is likely to be feeding those who live nearby--if international markets would allow them to do it. Food transport has become a bizarre and profitable economic equation that's no longer really about feeding anyone ... If you care about farmers, let the potatoes stay home.

Eating is a genuine need, continuous from our first day to our last, amounting over time to our most significant statement of what we are made of and what we have chosen to make of our connection to home ground.

No, you shouldn't. But you are here, so yes, you should be here. There are more words in the world than no and yes.

We've got story enough here to eff up more than one young life, but it is a project.

She wondered if humiliation ever ran its natural course and peeled off, like a sunburn, or just kept blazing.

The eye sees what it cares enough to see.