Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

That hand looked a hundred years old. Knuckles and gristle.

I am not one to argue with wild mushroomers who claim the distinction of being still alive.

Life is so stupid I can't stand it.

Mother, you had no life of your own.

Words only cover the experience of living.

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

some secrets kept themselves, out of a failure to stand up to the competing rumors. She

He wrote as if he'd been the one to carry the camera to each and every one of his life's events, and thus was unseen in all the pictures.

It's not that I wanted to be mean. But any time I started feeling sorry for her, something in my brain said Don't go there, it's a trap. I'd tried all the options with Mom and had only one place left to go on her. Cold.

To tell me it's supposed to stop raining, you came up here?" Lusa asked, looking from one sun-toughened face to the other for some clue. It was always like this, anytime she got wedged into a conversation with her brothers-in-law. This sense of having wandered into a country where they spoke English but all the words meant something different.

Alive, nobody matters much in the long run. But dead, some men matter more than others.

Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

What I'm saying is . . . What am I saying?" She tilted her head, the loopy earrings danced. "Okay, I like helping kids learn to see what they're looking at. But really and truly? I always hoped one day a spark would come along, that I could fan into a flame. Some whole new vision that the world actually needs.

At some point in the evening Dellarobia had stopped being amazed that Ovid had turned into someone new, and understood he had become himself, in the presence of his wife. With the sense of a great weight settling, she recognized marriage. Not the precarious risk she'd balanced for years against forbidden fruits, something easily lost in a brittle moment by flying away or jumping a train to ride off on someone else's steam. She was not about to lose it. She'd never had it.

Refusing to look at the evidence, this is also popular.

The devil here is a boy with too much imagination," he usually said.

Enrique felt a successful man needed no imagination at all.

He thinks people's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

Old homecoming queens never die.

But if a story has all the elements, it will be legend around here, where we love our neighbors so much we can't stop talking about them. It gets to be

Now, versus the old days. I said maybe the difference was we could see now what all we were missing. With everybody else in the world being richer than us, doing all kinds of nonsense and getting away with it. It pisses you off. It makes you restless.

For the kids who wake up hungry in those dark places every day, who've lost their families to poverty and pain pills, whose caseworkers keep losing their files, who feel invisible, or wish they were: this book is for you.

of people: if the shark comes, they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.

Diamond. He's bright and shiny and worth a lot. Harder than anything else there is.