Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

If you're surprised a mom would discuss boyfriend hotness with a kid still learning not to pick his nose, you've not seen the far end of lonely.

Was it normal now for parents to operate in the dark? She never knew what was fair to ask.

Dellarobia noted they were not a perfect physical match: Nelda plump and rosy-cheeked, her mother fine-boned. The resemblance blazed in their wide brown eyes and the way they nodded, the gnomy caps bobbing. Mother-daughter adventurers. She felt a pang of longing, as she often did in church. Everybody had a mother and a God; those were standard issue.

They saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious. That is what it means to be a beast in the kingdom

Ms. Annie said all God's children have to take a shit, but you'd never know it from the way they treat the ones that clean it up.

One day we came home from some errands to find a grocery sack of them hanging on our mailbox. The perpetrator, of course, was nowhere in sight. "Wow," we all said—"what a good idea!" Garrison Keillor says July is the only time of year when country people lock our cars in the church parking lot, so people won't put squash on the front seat. I used to think that was a joke.

The backs of his hands remind him of paper burning in the fireplace, the moment the taut membrane goes slack into a thousand wrinkles, just before it withers to ash and air.

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

in the first hour of dawn, just as the hem of the sky began to whiten.

What there is in this world I think is a tendency for human errors to level themselves like water throughout there sphere of influence. That's pretty much the whole of what I can say looking back. There is the possibility of balance.Unbearable burden that the world somehow bare with a certain grace.

from an excerpt by her daughter Camille] Living on the land that has grown my food gives me a sense of security I'm lucky to have. Feeling safe isn't so easy for people my age, who face odious threats like global warming, overpopulation, and chemical warfare in our future. But even as the world runs out of fuel and the ice caps melt, I will know the real sources of my sustenance. My college education may or may not land me a good job down the road, but my farm education will serve me.

A dead parent is a tricky kind of ghost. If you can make it into more like a doll, putting it in the real house and clothes and such that they had, it helps you to picture them as a person instead of just a person-shaped hole in the air.

So much of life with infirmity came down to dignity and will.

No one. I'm a pawn in this game. You're always first to say how unimportant I am. But at least I will be the pawn who tells the truth.

Sylvain] told us that in India it's sometimes considered a purification ritual to go home and spend a year eating everything from one place--ideally, even to grow it yourself. I liked this name for what we had done: a purification ritual, to cultivate health and gratitude. It sounds so much better than wackadoo.

Overweight children are a demographic in many ways similar to minors addicted to cigarettes, with one notable exception: their parents are usually their suppliers

capitalism, with its need for endless growth, is no longer viable? That we, the middle class, have to learn not to want so much?

Teaching struck Willa as a saintly calling, especially given the pay. But even saints shouldn't be stuck with intro classes forever.

The one thing you can trust is your kids will have more, not less. And now

She said Purdue looked at data and everything with their computers, and hand-picked targets like Lee County that were gold mines.

shit. Battle of Blair Mountain, that turned into the biggest war in America ever, other than the civil one. Twenty thousand guys from all over these mountains, fighting in regiments. They wore red bandannas on their necks to show they were all on the same side, working men. Mr. Armstrong said people calling us rednecks, that goes back to the red bandannas. Redneck is badass.

The world is not at all short on this type of thing, it turns out. All down the years, words have been flung like pieces of shit, only to get stuck on a truck bumper with up-yours pride. Rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables.

driving me to see my mom get put in the ground. It hit me pretty hard, how there's no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning. People will keep on wanting what they want, and you're on your own.

For starters," she said, "you acknowledge that stimulate is a synonym for stealing from the future.