Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

All hope and future lost in a day.

They had chickens at one time, including this rooster with the mind of a serial killer that gave me bad dreams.

LISTEN, don't believe in fairy tales! After that happy-ever-after wedding, they never tell you the rest of the story. Even if you get to marry the prince, you still wake up in the morning with your mouth tasting like drain cleaner and your hair all flat on one side.

She seemed like a person born to have sidewalks under her feet.

At his last checkup the pediatrician had observed the howling red face and trembling limbs, and said that infants process grief as trauma. Then suggested they try a different formula.

The standard approach has been to pump up the dosage of chemicals ... Twenty percent of these approved-for-use pesticides are listed by the EPA as carcinogenic in humans.

I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it's a feeling you keep having, even after that's no place anymore. Probably if they dropped a bomb and there wasn't any food left on the planet, you'd still keep feeling hungry too.

I believe I'm very happy.

A select group of friends and I have formed a secret slut society. We wear trousers, we have fascinating work, and it's possible that the dust bunnies under our beds could be breeding dust bison.

Willa believed in the power of worry to keep another human from flying out of orbit.

Thirty or forty bucks an hour, old men still talked like those were the days Jesus walked among us throwing around hundred-dollar bills.

As long as we won't commit to knowing everything, the presumption is we know nothing.

Some people say religion is finding yourself, and some people say it's losing yourself in a crowd.

People hang on for dear life to that one, she thought: the fool they are right now.

The only useful generalization I'd hazard about rural politics is that they tend to break on the line of "insider" vs. "outsider." When my country neighbors sit down with a new social group, the first question they ask one another is not "What do you do?" but rather, "Who are your people?

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain. Almost no one gets a chance to alter the course of human events on purpose, in the exact same way they wish for it to be altered.

Maybe it was just a father's duty to resist a daughter's drift toward another man.

So much human effort went into alteration of non-essential components

In my opinion, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you loook down on them from a great height.

But where is the place for girls in that Kingdom? The rules don't quite apply to us, nor protect us either. What do a girl's bravery and righteousness count for, unless she is also pretty? Just try being the smartest and most Christian seventh-grade girl in Bethlehem, Georgia. Your classmates will smirk and call you a square. Call you worse, if you're Adah.

some of the best were people that taught school.

Because DSS pay is basically the fuck-you peanut butter sandwich type of paycheck. That's what the big world thinks it's worth, to save the white-trash orphans. And if these kids grow up to throw punches at washing machines or each other or even let's say smash a drugstore drive-through window. Crawl in and take what's there. Tell me how you're going to be surprised. There's your peanut butter sandwich back. Every dog gets his day.

A book deal, Christ on a bike, quote unquote.

She said okay. Probably she thought I was growing up to be one more prick in her life, a junior-varsity Stoner. It's not that I wanted to be mean. But any time I started feeling sorry for her, something in my brain said Don't go there, it's a trap.