Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

The question is, why do you think you can't be a writer? To be a writer, you need readers. I'm no painter, then. Who ever looks at my little dumb pieces of shit?

Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow.

48-point type, a letter size that big-city newspapers probably reserve for special occasions such as Armageddon. Out here in the heartland, we are not waiting that long. Our local paper's stance on the great big headline letters is: You got 'em, you use 'em.

Poor thing, thought Garnett, to have to commit yourself so hard to one moment of poor judgment.

Jesus was a more reliable backer, evidently, less likely to drink himself unconscious or get liver cancer. No wonder people chose Him as their number-one friend.

WOMEN ON THEIR OWN RUN in Alice's family. This dawns on her with the unkindness of a heart attack and she sits up in bed to get a closer look at her thoughts, which have collected above her in the dark.

To live is to be marked, she said without speaking. To live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.

Certain ramshackle aspects of Dellarobia had also gone undercover, it seemed, just like the snow-covered barns. Some defects lurked, but for now her way seemed clear. She'd made plans.

I remembered my pep talk to Esperanza a few months before, and understood just how ridiculous it was. There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, There now, hang on, you'll get over it. Sadness is more or less like a head cold—with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

First, I got myself born. The worst of the job was up to me.

Waar het om gaat is dat als je het hebt over identiteit, je dat niet zomaar uit mensen kunt wegredeneren. Het verdwijnt niet door de minachting van buitenstaanders, het wordt er juist door verhevigd.

White men tell us: Vote, bantu! They tell us: You do not all have to agree, ce n'est pas nécessaire! If two men vote yes and one says no, the matter is finished. Á bu, even a child can see how that will end. It takes three stones in the fire to hold up the pot. Take one away, leave the other two, and what? The pot will spill into the fire.

We newspaper readers all have our pet vexations. Somewhere in one of those sections is the column we anxiously turn to for the sole purpose of disagreeing with the columnist. Volubly.

People had to manage terrible truths.

Léopoldville is a nice little town of dandy houses with porches and flowery yards on nice paved streets for the whites, and surrounding it, for miles and miles, nothing but dusty run-down shacks for the Congolese. They make their homes out of sticks or tin or anything in the world they can find. Father said that is the Belgians' doing and Americans would never stand for this kind of unequal treatment.

we've learned that some of our favorite things like DDT and the propellants in aerosol cans were rapidly unraveling the structure and substance of our biosphere. We gave them up, and reversed the threats. Now the reforms required of us are more systematic, and nobody seems to want to go first. (To be more precise, the U.S.A. wants to go last.)

I tried to explain the whole human-being aspect of everybody needing to dump on somebody. Stepdad smacks mom, mom yells at the kid, kid finds the dog and kicks it. (Not that we had one. I wrecked some havoc on my Transformers though.) We're the dog of America.

Many had tried their best with us, but we came out of too-hungry mothers. Four demons spawned by four different starving hearts.

Solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen.

Alabado sea el señor de todas las plagas y secretas aflicciones! Si Dios se divirtió inventando los lirios del campo, seguro que se partió de risa con los parásitos de África.

The back of my scalp and neck prickled. It's an involuntary muscle contraction that causes that, setting the hair follicles on edge; if we had manes they would bristle exactly like a growling dog's. We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts. There's no sense pretending.

But a thing grows teeth once it's put into words. Now I felt that worm digging

cradling the soup terrine that she set

This is not Brussels or Moscow or Macon, Georgia. This is famine or flood. You can't teach a thing until you've learned that. The tropics will intoxicate you with the sweetness of frangipani flowers and lay you down with the sting of a viper, with hardly room to breathe in between. It's a great shock to souls gently reared in places of moderate clime, hope, and dread.