Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

Eyes raised up, body tethered by one long thread to the big stormy sky, the whole of him up there with his words, talking to whoever was listening. I've not seen a sight to match it. No bones of his had ever been shoved in a feed bag. The man was a giant.

If I eat one more egg omelet I think Ill turn over easy and cluck.

I went on foot because I still had feet to carry me.

The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.

Thérèse leans close and looks up at me, her eyebrows tilting like the accents above her name.

I had a window seat, and in a Greyhound you're up high. You pass through the land like some rajah on an elephant looking down on your kingdom.

Sometimes, in his nightmares, everything on this desk sings at once. He comes back

He hid a scornful smile under his moustache, which is not a good hiding place.

They wait out the dry months kind of dead-like, just like everything else, and when the rain comes they wake up and crawl out of the ground and start to holler.

If his guilt made him a tyrant before men, it made him like a child before his God. Not a helpless or pleading child, but a petulant one, the type of tough boy who's known too little love and is quick to blame others for his mistakes.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which Tata Nzolo is home at the moment.

If no one has said outright that spying on Mr. Axelroot is a sin, then God probably couldn't technically hold it against me.

Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.

The dominant culture has a way of becoming more real than the stuff at hand.

Cub retreated to the familiar grounds of remorse and insufficiency, the terms of his existence, ratified by marriage.

Any sport that's not football around here is like vanilla. Why even eat that, if they've invented flavors.

For my part, I merely watched young, deprived female bosoms panting before my handsome husband, soldier of the Lord. (I longed to shout: Go ahead and try him, girls, I am too tired!)

Plenty of people took this way out, looking future damage in the eye and naming it something else.

We will change our ways significantly as a nation not when some laws tell us we have to (remember Prohibition?), but when we want

This is why we have families.... So we never have to go a single day without worrying ourselves sick.

Until that moment I'd always beloved i could still go home and pretend the Congo never happened

My grandmother had no use for anything in the line of boys or men. Any of them that stands up to make his water, was how she put it. Bad news for me.

Here, if any terrorists came flying over, they'd look down on trashed-out mine craters and blown-up mountains and say, "Keep going. This place already got taken out." It was hard to see how September 11 was my fight. As far as doing good for my fellow man, my better option was football.

History is not good news or bad news, it's just one big story unreeling. There are no small parts, only small actors.