Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.

motherless girl will come up wanting in some respects, but in my opinion she has a freedom unknown to other daughters. For every womanly fact of life she doesn't get told, a star of possibility still winks for her on the horizon.

the very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.

This was in the before-time, last days of. Still no internet with all the ways of saying, Let's us be better than those guys so we can hate on them.

Any one moment could be like this, I thought. A continental divide.

He's that same kind of good like you are. Like there's some metal or something in you that won't melt down, no matter what.

She stuck with a different theory: I needed to be more pushy with them. Did she give up on her dreams? No, she worked hard for what she wanted. Did I expect anybody to look out for Damon if he wouldn't look out for himself? Life is what you make it! Here's where Miss Barks didn't grow up: foster care. She had no clue how people can be living right on the edge of what's doable. If you push too hard, you can barrel yourself over a damn cliff.

He behaves as if he had no dead children. The real Leandro never comes here. He only pretends.

It's the thing you fear most that walks beside you all the time.

If the grown-up version of me could have one chance at walking backwards into this story, part of me wishes I could sit down on the back pew with that pissed-off kid in his overly tight church clothes and Darkhawk attitude, and tell him: You think you're giant but you are such a small speck in the screwed-up world. This is not about you.

I was still a bit appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microbes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting for the dollies. We and our vermin all blossomed together out of the same humid soil in the Great Rift Valley, and so far no one is really winning.

Jazon and Mical. What kind of mother misspelled her kids' names on purpose?

Age-old story, who gets to look down on who, for what reason.

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

Christmas music fills our ears with tales of a Palestinian miracle birth, a generous Turkish saint whom the Dutch dressed in a red suit, and a Druid ceremonial tree…

The truth is, it didn't matter what or how hard we yelled. Nothing was coming back to us.

It's football. Take that out of high school, it's church with no Jesus. Who would even go?

Good things don't get lost.

They won't admit to being bigots, so they want him fired for being a communist. Like they even know what a communist is!

On the verbal portion I missed four questions, all having to do with choosing a word in a series that doesn't belong. I have always had trouble with that line of questioning. Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.

He is the one wife belonging to many white men. Anatole explained it this way: Like a princess in a story, Congo was born too rich for her own good, and attracted attention far and wide from men who desire to rob her blind. The United States has now become the husband of Zaire's economy, and not a very nice one. Exploitive and condescending, in the name of steering her clear of the moral decline inevitable to her nature.

Living in a holler, the sun gets around to you late in the day, and leaves you early. Like much else you might want.

The wisteria vines on their own would just barely get by…but put them together with rhizobia and they make miracles.

They wanted payback. I thought about what Rose sadi, 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.