Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

Picture a single imaginary plant, bearing throughout one season all the different vegetables we harvest…we'll call it a vegetannual.

A dead parent is a tricky kind of ghost. If you can make it into more like a doll, putting it in the real house and clothes and such that they had, it helps you to picture them as a person instead of just a person-shaped hole in the air. Which helps you feel less like a person-shaped invisible kid.

Stoner asks what I think I'm doing. I tell him I am mopping the floor, spelled with a silent As you can plainly see, dumbass.

My favored mulching method is to cover the ground between rows of plants with a year's worth of our saved newspapers; the paper and soy-based ink will decompose by autumn. Then we cover all that newsprint—comics, ax murderers, presidents, and all—with a deep layer of old straw. It is grand to walk down the rows dumping armloads of moldy grass glop onto the faces of your less favorite heads of state: a year in review, already starting to compost.

Every education brings a point of reckoning, and this was his: seeing the world divided in two camps, the investigators and the sweeteners

my old Aunt Tess. She was a mother to me if I needed one. What Aunt Tess loved to say was: "Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up your pace." And that was more or less what we all believed in.

Red on! Depends much. So?

Taking art classes on repeat, you learn a alot about color, but I can't explain that blue. You see it in photos of icy lands. Peacock blue in the deep center, shading out to clear on the pebbly edges....My eye kept going back to the turquoise middle. You so rarely see that, but children will color water taht way every time, given the right choice of crayons. Like they were born knowing there's better out there than what we're getting. -p. 531

Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There's no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.

At sunrise it always seems like you've got a good crack at getting everything done, but at sunset you know that you didn't.

Most of us are creatures so comforted by habit, it can take something on the order of religion to invoke new, more conscious behaviors - however glad we may be afterward that we went to the trouble.

Marriages tended to harden like arteries..

How are people so irrational?" he asked, but he knew. Even the abolitionists had no wish to be placed inside creation, subject to its laws. They wished to rule over it from the head of God's table.

It is possible to establish zero tolerance for murder as a solution to anything

marched uphill to meet her demise.

Bangala means something precious and dear. But the way he pronounces it, it means the poisonwood tree.

It was a rule of marriage: the more desperately you needed alone time with your spouse, the quicker you'd spoil it with a blowout. When

There is no stepping in the same river twice. So say the Greek philosophers, and the crocodiles make sure.

For some, a lousy day's work will get you yelled at. For farmers, it's live or die.

But approaching mealtimes as a creative opportunity, rather than a chore, is an option.

Acknowledgments) 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.

year and ring in the new. Rhubarb, the April fruit. I'm a monkey's uncle.

Well, that's how thick I am, I never knew how to want what everyone wants. I only thought to look for a home, some place to be taken in. Handing over a crumpled heart, seeing it dropped in the wastepaper basket every time. Here, though. Americans sent love letters in return.

Tata Jesus is bangala!