Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

hell hath no fury like a Baptist preacher.

Where does the road to ruin start? That's the point of getting all this down, I'm told. To get the handle on some choice you made. Or was made for you.

Both of us were spared, in body at least, by the stone walls of our different imprisonments, and altered in spirit, in ways we're still struggling to understand.

I avoided the emplyee smoking room aka drug-exchange HQ, and found no real downside to the job [in the produce department]. People buying apples and green beans usually have some degree of joy in their hearts. -p. 513

This is darkest Africa, where life roars by you like a flood and you grab whatever looks like it will hold you up.

We will change our ways significantly as a nation not when some laws tell us we have to (remember Prohibition?), but when we want to.

No matter what kind of night you're having, morning always wins.

While the little boys ran around pretending to shoot each other and fall dead in the road, it appeared that little girls were running the country.

She's up on the rent and has her drawer full of sobriety chips that she takes out late at night and looks over like a dragon sitting on its treasure.

Oh, and the camel. Was it a camel that could pass through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man? Or a coarse piece of yarn? The Hebrew words are the same, but which one did they mean? If it's a camel, the rich man might as well not even try. But if it's the yarn, he might well succeed with a lot of effort, you see?

I'm going to tell you something, there's country poor, and there's city poor. No desperate [man in the city] ever went out and shot venison if they were hungry. they shot liquor store cashiers. Living in the big woods made of steel and cement, without cash, is a hungrier life than I knew how to think about.

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

I suppose it is in our nature," she said finally. "When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order." "If that is our nature, then nature is madness. These are more dangerous times than we ever have known." *

That a craving can ratchet itself up and up inside a body and mind, at the same time that body's strength for tolerating its favorite drug goes down and down.

Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet

will put you off candy corn for life.

nothing wondrous can come in this world unless it rests on the shoulders of kindness. He

Away, down below now, single file on the path, comes a woman with four girls in tow, all of them in shirtwaist dresses. Seen from above this way they are pale, doomed blossoms, bound to appeal to your sympathies. Be careful. Later on you'll have to decide what sympathy they deserve.

believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book

the secret of happiness is low expectations.

What's with everybody always trying to get rid of the Indians? I said, not really asking for an answer. I thought again of the history-book pictures. Astronomers and brain surgeons. They should have done brain surgery on Columbus while they had the chance.

Something like that is as bad or as good as a telephone ringing in the night: either way, you're not as alone as you think.

One has only a life of one's own.

Freedom of the presses to destroy a person's life for no good reason. (Lacuna, p. 419)