Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.

Desperate to save myself in a river of people saving themselves. And if they chanced to look down and see me struggling underneath them, they saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious. That is what it means to be a beast in the kingdom.

Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of dirt.

They would watch, ears up, forepaws planted, patiently bearing with the mess made by undisciplined humans as the world fell down around them.

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

I'd tried all the options with Mom and had only one place left to go on her. Cold.

Who else could make the colors of the aurora borealis rise off my skin where he strokes my forearm? Or send needles of ice tinkling blue through my brain when he looks in my eyes?

One look at her and I was gone. This is the truth, it was first sight. I fell down a well into some shiny dream, and if somebody had thrown me a

If it came to pass that Thatcher should shake hands with President Grant, as Polly predicted, he would still be a man who viewed life from the bottom of the ditch, not the top.

Her breath expanded her chest against my arms, and I thought of the way a tree will keep on growing after a fence is wired around its trunk. The unbelievable force of that expansion. And I let her go.

I'm hurt, okay, but in this game, pain is not the enemy. Failure is your enemy. Being too slow, missing an opening, miscalculating a pass, these things you control. Doing it right is your only friend, messing up is your foe, and the distance between them is all you are here to care about. The rest is landscape. Pain is the turf under your cleats. Pain is weather.

Converstations with a mother of five are education in patience.

Emelina and I took each other in. All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

Angus. It's football. Take that out of high school, it's church with no Jesus. Who would even go?

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.

Natalya hugged him hard, already torn with remorse over the forces that govern this family. "No, Seva, you won't be allowed to capture it," she said. "Your grandfather believes in freedom.

How dire was the descent of a man's life, Thatcher mused, that he should now be stricken with spider jealousy.

Odds are about a hundred to one, you are not destined for greatness. Your people will appreciate you all the same.

I may be a preacher's daughter, but I know a thing or two. And one of them is, when men want to kiss you they act like they are just on the brink of doing something that's going to change the whole wide world.

George Washington marched the US Army on our people for refusing to pay tax on corn liquor. Which they weren't even selling for money, mainly just making for neighborly entertainment.

they'd shared an exuberance that eventually suffocated under tenure applications and mortgages. This was not a new story. Maybe Iano still had access to that kind of joy, but she'd surrendered it as her half of the marital bargain.

The truest truth. For my whole sixteen years I've rarely thought I was worth much more than a distracted grumble from God. But now in my shelter of all things impossible, I drift in a warm bath of forgiveness, and it seems pointless to resist. I have no energy for improving myself. If Anatole can wrap all my rattlebone sins in a blanket and call me goodness itself, why then I'll just believe him.

We probably started painting our nails Immoral Coral after everybody sensible had already gone on to pink, but heck, at least we were all behind the times together.

Height isn't something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.