Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

His mother had let him carry two valises: one for books, one for clothes. The clothes were a waste, outgrown instantly. He should have filled both with books.

In the scullery kitchens and probably the salt mines of this world, many a child is not so much raised as hammered into shape, Artie. To be of use. Surviving by the grace of utility alone.

You've built the fire up way too hot," I told her. "Go to hell, Leah, just go straight, directly to hell.

through the woods. Big Bear. I heard him fall

Tommy showed me one with the actual headline "Blight On the Nation." Another one said "smudge on the map," that he'd highlighted with yellow marker.

The leopards will walk upright like men on our paths. The snakes will come out of the ground and seek our houses instead of hiding in their own.

I became determined to know a few steps more of that path every day.

Poor Dan is in a droop.

Good people, bad people, what does that even mean? Get down to the rock and the hard place, and we're all just soft flesh and the weapon at hand.

Lily picked up her spoon and dipped into Rock Bottom Farm's maple ice cream. We could hear the crash of corporate collapse with every bite. Tough work, but somebody's got to do it.

Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn't been totaled or repossessed. - Miss Annie, pg. 424

She'd never even seen a lightning bug. That is just tragic.

According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo rather than, say, north Georgia, where she could attend church regularly. This was the sticking point in my own little lame march to salvation: admission to heaven is gained by the luck of the draw.

Around this time I made my plan. Dangerous possibly, crazy for sure. All I can say is, you try living in crazytown for a while and see what you cook up.

His wife was approximately a hundred years younger than him

The Peggots were stuck, not able to move forward with the normal death matters of cooking and drinking. It was all just loose ends and talk. Like if they hashed through it enough times, they might get to a different ending.

It's true. I'm not a happy-on-the-midlist kind of gal.

Actual fact: you could make an entire second world out of what people throw away. The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in day out. The idea though is to be moving up the ladder, not down, like the McCobbs were.

That the electorate could validate such a mean, grabby, self-aggrandizing man. At any level.

we went on record as half-bad musicians having wholehearted lives.

They wanted payback. I thought about what Rose said, wanting to see the rest of us hurt, because she was hurting. You have to wonder how much of the whole world's turning is fueled by that very fire. -p. 496

The writing of fiction is a dance between truth and invention

Sóli, let me tell you. The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.

The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners. Our culture is not acquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're juts particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text.