Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

In my time I've learned surprising things about the powers stacked against us before we're born. But the way of my people is to go on using the words they've always given us: Ignorant bastard. Shit happens.

Every kid has it tough. Being a little person in a big world with nobody taking you very seriously is tough.

Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways.

A godo story doesn't just copy life, it pushes back on it. ... It's why guys like Chartrain wear their clothes too big and their teeth edged with gold, why Mr. Dick puts words on kites and sends them to the sun...

Respecting the dignity of a spectacular food means enjoying it at its best.

If I'd known what marriage was going to be like, well, heck, I probably would have tied all those hope-chest linens into a rope and hung myself from a tree!

loved the air after a hard rain, and the way a forest of dripping leaves fills itself with a sibilant percussion that empties your head of words.

every step you take, as regards the druggie mother?

This is how conquest occurs: one plan is always larger than the other.

We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.

Mother says I never practiced anything but always watched Leah, letting her make the mistakes for both of us, until I was ready to do it myself with acceptable precision. Mother is kind to me, probably because I've stayed nearer at hand than her other children. But I disagree. I made plenty of my own mistakes. I just made them on the inside.

Then again, do you have to be told every single thing about the world before you know it?

Probably Emmy had moved now. I would be in Knoxville soon, she'd be in Lee County, and whoever was sitting at control center of the universe, laughing his ass off.

Nearly every day I wake up shocked at how little in this world I comprehend.

It hit me pretty hard, how there's no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning.

Thousands of ordinary people were part of this metropolis, but their homes would have been perishable wattle and thatch, stuccoed with lime and mud. Every trace of their living has returned to the earth now, except for the limestone temples of art and worship. The things made of ambition, which rise higher than daily bread.

But a nation gloats on the hostility of its enemies, whereas Hallie had proved the malevolence of some men we supplied with machine guns. Hallie was a skeleton in the civic closet.

I remembered all my tall tales to strangers on buses. I was explaining in my own way; making things up so there would be no discussion of what I was really.

God grants us long enough lives to punish ourselves.

TELL ALL THE TRUTH but tell it slant, says my friend Emily Dickinson.

That's the great American disease, we forget. We watch the disasters parade by on TV, and every time we say: 'Forget it. This is somebody else's problem.

No dictionary has words that can make Lev understand estrangement between a father and son.

No matter what happens on God's green earth, Father acts like it's a movie he's already seen and we're just dumb for not knowing how it comes out.

He noticed the children less and less. He was hardly a father except in the vocational sense, as a potter with clay to be molded.