Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

The first to fall in any war are forgotten. No love gets lost over one person's reckless mistake. Only after it's a mountain of bodies bagged do we think to raise a flag and call the mistake by a different name, because one downfall times a thousand has got to mean something. It needs its own brand, some point to all the sacrifice. Mom was the unknown soldier.

carry a heart past unbearable losses...and strike its path through one more day: Get up and make intentions. I intend to call a friend on the phone. I intend to notice the flowers in the yard.

Now I need to be careful where I go next, because (for their own protection) there are laws in thirteen states that make it illegal to say anything bad about cows.

Now I know, whatever your burdens, to hold yourself apart from the lot of more powerful men is an illusion.

Dellarobia watched the void of this man where once there had been wonder, and she despaired of her future. In such a short time he had relieved her of a lifetime of illusions, and already she missed them.

When you're given a brilliant child, you polish her and let her shine.

I see books as windows out of a little life into the great world. Writing fiction is a dance. It's controlled lunacy. Hearing voices in your head — they give people drugs for that. Humans have always needed story. Fiction isn't entertainment, it's a cultural nutrient. We need it, and we will always need it. (from her talk at the Free Library of Philadelphia on 11/10/12)

Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, i have taught myself joy, over and over again.

I could say was, Tommy, you know and I know, neither way is really better. In the long run it's all just hustle. So our hustle is different. So what? And he said, I'm still figuring that part out.

I felt as though I had a blind date with destiny, and someone had heard a rumor that destiny looked like Christopher Reeve.

Somehow it had come to pass that this man was her whole world, and she had failed to take his measure.

There he'd found the pasteboard notebook: the most beautiful book ever, it could become anything.

I was occupied so entirely by each day, I felt detached from anything so large as a month or a year.

out in the garden. But I'll tell you a secret. When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.

Loser is a cliff. Once you've gone over, you're over.

That's how it always is with us. Step too far one way or the other and you've got on your sister's toes.

So what do I know about ocean, still yet to stand on its sandy beard and look it in the eye? Still waiting to meet the one big thing I know is not going to swallow me alive.

Obviously other ones did exist such as basketball, but not in Lee County. Any sport that's not football around here is like vanilla. Why even eat that, if they've invented flavors.

Tig would have fit on that plane just fine. Tig, Art, Takis, these anomalous, scrappy survivors, might be the lucky ones. They ate less and took up less space: the humans of the future.

And my husband, why, hell hath no fury like a Baptist preacher.

We had the moon in the window to smile on us for a minute and tell us the world was ours. Because all the adults had gone off somewhere and left everything in our hands.

If a shipment of ground beef somehow gets contaminated with pathogens, our federal government does not have authority to recall the beef, only to request that the company issue a recall.

Today was the day. Every day was the day.

Likewise the Charles Dickens one, seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat's ass. You'd think he was from around here.