Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

I am losing faith in such a simple thing as despising an enemy with unequivocal righteousness.

We only knew, somewhat abstractly, we were going to spend a year integrating our food choices with our family values, which include both "love your neighbor" and "try not to wreck every blooming thing on the planet while you're here.

But Pascal quickly forgave me, and it's a good thing, since friends of my own age and gender were not available, the girls of Kilanga all being too busy hauling around firewood, water, or babies. It did cross my mind to wonder why Pascal had the freedom to play and roam that his sisters didn't. While the little boys ran around pretending to shoot each other and fall dead in the road, it appeared that little girls were running the country.

Boys aren't a thing but just little men still learning what to aim at.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.

I think of my canning as fast food, paid for in time up front.

it had been her mother who put Willa back together. When someone mattered like that, you didn't lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.

Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.' That's

Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all, he declared to the sky, squinting up at God and demanding justice. I held him in my arms at night and saw parts of his soul turn to ash. Then I saw him reborn, with a stone in place of his heart. Nathan would accept no more compromises.

A kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing. If you get past that and grown, it's easiest to forget about the misery and pretend you knew all along what you were doing. Assuming you've ended up someplace you're proud to be. And if not, easier to forget the whole thing, period. So this is going to be option three, not proud, not forgetting. Not easy.

half the town would claim they'd seen it coming, just because they thrived on downfalls of any sort.

We squatted over the hole and waited. The ant struggled in the soft, sandy trap until a pair of pincers suddenly reached up and grabbed it, thrashed up a little dust, and pulled it under. Gone, just like that. "Don't do any more of them, Leah," Ruth May said. "The ant wasn't bad." I felt embarrassed, being told insect morals by my baby sister. Usually cruelty inspired Ruth May no end, and I was just desperate to help her get her spirits back.

In their universe, nobody shuts you down for being different and wanting the moon. In ours, you live on a tether: to family, parents if you're lucky, older people raising you if less so, that you yourself will end up looking after by and by.

I have tried to teach my children to love nature as my parents taught that reverence to me -- through example, proximity, and plenty of field guides and age-appropriate biology books.

That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that's how they do it here. Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.

In summer a young rooster's fancy turns to…how can I say this delicately? The most ham-fisted attempts at courtship I've ever had to watch. (And yes, I'm including high school.)

I loved fishing those old mud-bottomed ponds. Partly because she would be proud of whatever I dragged out, but also I just loved sitting still. You could smell leaves rotting into the cool mud and watch the Jesus bugs walk on the water, their four little feet making dents in the surface but never falling through. And sometimes you'd see the big ones, the ones nobody was ever going to hook, slipping away under the water like dark-brown dreams.

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.

Church was his trouble," she said. "It started him off on the wrong foot.

It's just lucky for Father he never had any sons. He might have been forced to respect them.

The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is a key to moving away from manual labor, and dirt—two undeniable ingredients of farming.

Because what would be left, when all these books were in the past? He lay awake nights dreading it.

Mary and Thatcher had lived in enviable times, when biologists were discovering new species right and left, not watching them go extinct.

It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born. Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed. A lightning that cannot strike twice, our lesson learned in the hateful speed of light. A bite at light at Ruth a truth a sky-blue presentiment and oh how dear we are to ourselves when it comes, it comes, that long, long shadow in the grass.