Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

The way he looked. 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.

God made us the butt of the joke universe.

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.

Maggot calmed me down by explaining Bible stories were a category of superhero comics.

My firstborn and my baby both tried to shed me like a husk from the start, and the twins came with a fine interior sight with which they could simply look past me at everything more interesting.

Right there in the middle of the road he took the cigarette out of my mouth and put it in his, then struck a match on his thumbnail and lit the two of them together, exactly like Humphrey Bogart. Then, ever so gently, he put the lit cigarette back in my lips. It seemed almost like we had kissed. Chills ran down my back, but I couldn't tell for sure if it was thrill chills or the creeps. Sometimes it is very hard to know the difference.

For a Christmas tree we had a palm frond stuck in a bucket of rocks. As we gathered around it and waited our turn to open our meager, constructive gifts, I stared at that pitiful frond decorated with white frangipani angels going brown around the edges, and decided the whole thing would have been better off ignored.

She stops trying to talk for a while, since there is nothing to say about a lost child that can change one star in a father's lonely sky.

If his decision to keep us here in the Congo wasn't right, then what else might he be wrong about? It has opened up in my heart a sickening world of doubts and possibilities, where before I had only faith in my father and love for the Lord. Without that rock of certainty underfoot, the Congo is a fearsome place to have to sink or swim.

To be here was to be known. If Lee County isn't that, it's nothing.

it. But when a man's words are taken from him and poisoned, it's the same as poisoning the man. He could not speak, for how his own tongue would be fouled. Words were his all. I felt I'd witnessed a murder, just as he'd seen his friend murdered in Mexico. Only this time they left the body living.

Remy, my third husband, was very devoted. He was an older man. My life has been 101 Calamities with at least half of them in the marriage department, but finally I got lucky in love, with Remy Fairley. He at least had the decency to die and leave me the Equatorial... the nicest hotel for business men

Kids aren't the problem. It's parents. There's this whole little Armstrong haters' club that's practically a task force of the PTA. They won't admit to being bigots, so they want him fired for being a communist. Like they even know what a communist is!

Even now I probably think more than the normal about water, floating in it, just the color blue itself and how for the fish, that blue is the whole deal. Air and noise and people and our all-important hectic nonsense, a minor irritant if even that.

Sixty-four," Adah said. Even though she talked now, it was like she was still handing over her little written announcements on notebook paper.

It came in three speeds: the jars with green lids were "mild," whereas pink meant "hot." The red-lidded jars were so-called "firecracker style." The latter was not a big hit with the kids.

I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass.

things I'd done with Hallie were clear, because we

Layers of orange like a buttermilk pie cooling on the horizon.

Father had not spoken up yet. My theory was he didn't know who to jump on first, the insulting Underdowns or his cussing wife, so he just stood there brewing like a coffeepot.

You can get to a point of needing to make the loudest possible noise just to see if you are still alive.

I needed no snake to tell me I didn't belong in that family or house, or life. I was the tree of knowledge.

I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it's a feeling you keep having, even after that's no place anymore.

The policy of our nation is made in cities, controlled largely by urban voters who aren't well informed about the changes on the face of our land, and the men and women who work it.