Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

But the weirdness wasn't in what I didn't know. It's what I did know.

The need to shelter her family never lifted its weight from her shoulders, but in practical terms she was useful to no one there but the dog and the baby.

The thing about Angus. We both had our crap to live with, and her way was to give no shit whether you liked how she was doing it, or not. But if I wanted to be a different type person and try for popular, she wasn't going to stand in my way. She was going to help. Not very usual.

a good story doesn't just copy life, it pushes back on it. It's

A thousand fishes make the school, but they always move together: one great, bright, brittle altogetherness.

bandicoots, Carruth. They'll be wanting their happy

She wanted to know did that mean getting married. I said why not. We were never getting married, we could barely pull our act together to buy a phone plan.

Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light.

When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order." "If that is our nature, then nature is madness. These are more dangerous times than we ever have known." *

She watched the dark highway and entertained me with her vegetable-soup song, except that now there were people mixed in with the beans and potatoes: Dwayne Ray, Mattie, Esperanza, Lou Ann and all the rest. And me. I was the main ingredient.

Around the table went the Oh sure, Mom face that mothers everywhere know and do not love.

Even this far inland, New Jersey was still recovering from Hurricane Sandy, which in its time, a few years back, had been called the storm of the century. How foolish it seemed now to label anything "of the century." This one was still a teenager with an anger-management problem and a long future ahead.

It is widely rumored, and also true, that I wrote my first novel in a closet.

tell him I am mopping the floor, spelled with a silent As you can plainly see, dumbass. He says he doesn't think that's going to do the job.

There's no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.

You could probably think of a hundred little things that would have made this turn out different. But you'd be wrong. A life like your sister's isn't some little pony you can turn around any way you want. It's a train. Once it gets going it's heavier than heaven and hell put together and it runs on its own track.

Corporate growers, if their only motive is profit, will find ways to follow the letter of organic regulations while violating their spirit.

Before the redneck miner wars, the coal land grabs, the timber land grabs. Whiskey Rebellion: an actual war. George Washington marched the US Army on our people for refusing to pay tax on corn liquor. Which they weren't even selling for money, mainly just for neighborly enjoyment. 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. (land economy vs. Money economy) -p. 523

my heart felt like a soft, damaged place in my chest, like a bruise on a peach.

Lonesome! Nothing lonesomer than getting shackled to a bully-man in his house of spite.

she was always one to tell me I should start trusting the wild ride, meaning life or whatever. Because it's not one hundred percent fucked up, once in a while it delivers.

Like a little blue prizefighter. Those are the words she'd use later on, being not at all shy to discuss the worst day of my mom's life. And if that's how I came across to the first people that laid eyes on me, I'll take it. To me that says I had a fighting chance.

Willa was confounded. Millennials she thought she knew: the overmothered cyborgs helplessly sunk in their virtual worlds. From what planet came this new, slightly feral tribe of fixers, makers, and barterers, she had no idea.

Well, Hallelujah and pass the ammunition. Company for dinner! And and eligible bachelor at that, without three wives or even one as far as I know. Anatole, the schoolteacher, is twenty=four eyars of age, with all his fingers still on, both eyes and both feet, and that is the local idea of a top-throb dreamboat. Well, naturally he is not in my color category, but even if I were a Congolese girl I'm afraid I'd have to say thanks but no thanks to Anatole.