Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

I always hated the sound of that. Polly Sigh. It sounds like mass hysteria in a sorority house." "Or one of those inflatable sex dolls." Still he read.

Every one of us is called upon, probably many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job or a limb or a loved one, a graduation, bringing a new baby home: it's impossible to think at first how this all will be possible. Eventually, what moves it all forward is the subterranean ebb and flow of being alive among the living.

It seems like almost anything is better than having only yourself to blame when you screw things up.

We Belgians made slaves of them and cut off their hands in the rubber plantations. Now you Americans have them for a slave wage in the mines and let them cut off their own hands. And you, my friend, are stuck with the job of trying to make amens.

It struck me what a wide world of difference there was between our sort of games—"Mother May I?," "Hide and Seek"—and his: "Find Food," "Recognize Poisonwood," "Build a House.

Putana thalassa pou se gamoun ta psaria." Meaning, "whore ocean where all the fish fuck each other.

why, he very nearly almost looked handsome. If you could ignore the telltale signs that he is a certified creep.

was a guy called Copperhead. Supposedly he had the dark skin and light-green eyes of a Melungeon, and red hair that made you look twice.

sweet orange Jaune Flammes, which are just the right size to slice in half, sprinkle with salt and thyme, and bake for several hours until they resemble cow flops (the recipe says "shoes," if you prefer).

Truth is objective. A man should be respected for telling it, not threatened.

Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're just particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text.

Geneticists have confirmed that milk-drinking adults are the exception to the norm, identifying a deviant gene on the second chromo-some that causes lactase persistence. (The gene is SNP C/T13910, if you care.)

Am I the only one getting shocked to smithereens here?

But it was no exaggeration, he'd witnessed this very thing in a market square in Boston: the crude effigy dangling from a noose, the monkey's tail pinned to the stuffed trousers, the murderous crowd chanting Lock him up!

Passing through every wall are electronic beams that create a shadow play of desire staged by the puppeteers of globalized commerce, who fund their advertising each year with more than a hundred dollars spent for this planet's every man, woman, child.

I hadn't thought before about how self-sufficiency could turn on you in old age or sickness.

But you don't ask questions of an attic. Museums are their own justification.

I've tried in this telling, time and time again, to pinpoint the moment where everything starts to fall apart. Everything, meaning me. But there's also the opposite, where some little nut cracks open inside you and a tree starts to grow. Even harder to nail. Because that thing's going to be growing a long time before you notice. Years maybe. then one day you say, Huh, that little crack between my ears has turned into this whole damn tree of wonderful. 515

If that is our nature, then nature is madness. These are more dangerous times than we ever have known.

So that was me promising Emmy that life is to be trusted. I knew better. I should have let her go with her gut: Never get back on the horse, because it's going to throw you every damn chance it gets.

Pushing a refrigerated green vegetable from one end of the earth to another is, let's face it, a bizarre use of fuel. But there's a simpler reason to pass up off-season asparagus: it's inferior.

I'm just a plain hillbilly from East Jesus Nowhere with this adopted child that everybody keeps on telling me is dumb as a box of rocks.

To amuse my depraved Ada self

I feared not, and grew accustomed to walking alone.