Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

How strange that a boy could make a kite of his pants, fly them around the world, and somehow arrive back at the house where everything began.

Then comes the day where Turp is waiting by my locker like a big red balloon fixing to pop.

In the Peggots' church, with the butt-polished wood benches and the colored glass windows like jigsaw puzzles of Jesus and sheep. Not one of these in-town churches with the fake steeple and signboard out front with God jokes, just your regular country church, small. But my Lord what a crowd. At

People change, she said. Not everything stays with you all your life.

Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative truth but not its twin.

We try to reason with one another, but only manage to tear ourselves apart.

this whole other life of little beings out here minding their business and not actually giving a damn about yours. It could set you back on your haunches, in a good way. Why I liked the woods.

mouthwise, June was an AR-15. Instant reload, engineered to kill.

I'd give anything to have stayed home. If wishes were horses, like they say. We'd all have different shit to shovel.

In the Peggots' church, with the butt-polished wood benches and the colored glass windows like jigsaw puzzles of Jesus and sheep. Not one of these in-town churches with the fake steeple and signboard out front with God jokes, just your regular country church, small. But my Lord what a crowd.

Probably there is no real invention in the modern world, he said. Just a good deal of elaboration on nature.

Do you have children? I have five. Three girls, two boys, all scoundrels. But not an anarchist in the brood. I've failed completely.

the lonely look down upon the hungry; the hungry look down upon the starving. The guilty blame the damaged. Those of doubtful righteousness speak of cannibals, the unquestionably vile, the sinners and the damned. It makes everyone feel much better.

All these brilliant colors in this hopeless place, it kills you.

All human odes are essentially one. "My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it.

a husband quits a wife, leaving her with her naked body curled around the emptied-out mine of her womb. I know people.

colonial American and Australian schoolchildren once memorized poems about British skylarks while the blue jays or cockatoos (according to continent) squawked outside, utterly ignored. The dominant culture has a way of becoming more real than the stuff at hand.

regular Niagara of blond highlights was Crystal, sitting alone with her breakfast, gazing at it with such earnest focus, you'd think she was on a first date with that Pepsi and glazed doughnut.

There is nothing boring about the prospect of extinction.

How do you get tax money out of moonshine? Answer: You and what army. It goes a ways to explaining people's feelings about taxes and guns.

The Lord rideth,' he said, low and threatening, 'upon a swift cloud, and shall come into Egypt.

Willa regretted every failure while she held her daughter and stroked her hair and marveled that mothers' and daughters' hearts can be crushed so repeatedly without learning to defend themselves. She thought of times she'd fallen apart in her own mother's arms, and let herself be put back together.

Pueblo men have to marry out of the clan, and sometimes they go off the pueblo. The land down here stays with the women.