Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

All those hopes placed in such a precarious vessel.

His only advice was to be careful in Unicoi because there were folks down there mean enough to hang an elephant. I said okay, thinking it was an expression his people had. But no. They gave the death penalty to an elephant there one time.

As a kid you just accept different worlds with different rules, even between some houses and others.

People love to believe in danger, as long as it's you in harm's way

To hear you tell it, you'd think man was only put on this earth to keep urinals from going to waste.

the most remarkable feature of human culture is its capacity to reach beyond the self and encompass the collective good; yet

If you're standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight.

Forgive me, Dellarobia. It's a selfish habit. I never learn anything from listening to myself.

I was afraid of crying if I couldn't touch her.

It's the radio, you see. The radio makes everyone feel the same thing at the same time. Instead of millions of various thoughts, one big psychological fixation. The radio commands our gut response.

here where we pay soothsayers and acrobats to help lose our weight

One of those hot, rainy days where you feel like you're breathing your own breath out of a paper bag.

These people and vegetarians and so forth that are all about being fair to the races and the gays, I am down with that. I agree. But would it cross any mind to be fair to us? No, it would not. How do I know? TV. The comedy channel is so funny it can make you want to go unlock the gun cabinet and kill yourself. Do they really think that along with being brainless and having sex with animals, we don't even have cable?

Maybe it's true what they say, that as long as you're nursing your own pain, whatever it is, you'll turn your back on others in the same boat. You'll want to believe the fix they're in is their own damn fault.

I took Mom's word on that because you hear of such things, folks so godly as to pass around snakes, also passing around black eyes. If this is a new one on you, maybe you also think a dry county is a place where there's no liquor to be found.

From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.

Lusa bit her lip against the strange ache in her belly. This night was out of control completely, she thought, but what could you do? We're only what we are: a woman cycling with the moon, and a tribe of men trying to have sex with the sky.

know how that sounds. But you get twenty people in a big circle talking and chugging, and the effect is pretty good.

The tree was intact, not cut or broken by wind. What a waste. After maybe centuries of survival it had simply let go of the ground, the wide fist of its root mass ripped up and resting naked above a clay gash in the wooded mountainside. Like herself, it just seemed to have come loose from its station in life.

He made a habit of prattling at the top of his lungs through Sunday dinners at our house. Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise.

The dancers were butterflies. From a hundred paces Salomé could see the dirt under these girls' fingernails, but not their wings.

Vester died in dogwood winter. April, the month of the whole sorry world praying for deliverance, with dogwoods and redbuds all pretty on the roadsides and new green leaves lighting up the mountains.

One other person can go a long way towards making your world right, she said, but the support has to run both ways. ... Saying love has to come from a strong place, not just grabbing whatever's in reach. You can't choose your family, but partner is your best shot at a decent do-over. 432

I was struck through with my own wayward brand of reverence: praise be the lord of all plagues and secret afflictions! If God had amused himself inventing the lilies of the field, he surely knocked His own socks off with the African parasites.