Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

Weeds are job security for the gardener.

It's hard to explain how you can miss a place and want it with all your heart, and be utterly sure it will obliterate you the instant you touch down.

I'll lead you to the river of knowledge. You can catch your own damn fish.

Biding my time till I turned sixteen and could drop out of school, with a whole life ahead for applying myself to full-time shit work.

Small was her destiny. And despite that, or because of it, she'd grown up with the furies in her sails, honing her confidence in verbal and physical combat with a brother who quickly doubled her in size. She had the temperament of the fire-eyed little shih tzu at the dog park that takes on the rottweilers with zero sense of disadvantage.

Even a spotted pig looks black at night.

I hear America singing! Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs!

To the best of my abilities, I made it sad and true to the laughable mess of addicted youth. Also bitter. In one of my strips, Crash is filling his pill-mill scrip and the pharmacy lady leans over to warn him, "This one's strong, hon. The Purdue rep takes it so he can sleep nights.

I would concede now that all these things were fabrications based on stories I'd heard. Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.

Teach them to see evidence for themselves, and not to fear it." "To stand in the clear light of day

I'm a scientist who thinks it wise to enter the doors of creation not with a lion tamer's whip and chair, but with the reverence humankind has traditionally summoned for entering places of worship: a temple, a mosque, or a cathedral. A sacred grove, as ancient as time.

nothing wondrous can come in this world unless it rests on the shoulders of kindness.

I wanted to tell them it's not just girls that end up inside four walls of hate and knuckles for breakfast, it can be anybody. Hate comes along and lays out the damn doormat and there you are. But I kept my mouth shut. It's safer knowing more about people than they know about you.

You had to be careful with large families.

But I don't happen to agree. If chained is where you have been, your arms will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You'll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you'll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.

If Doc Homer found out, he would construct some punishment to cure us of superstition. We agreed with him in principle—we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

You have to get up every morning and decide again, in the cold lonely light of day, am I brave enough to stick this out?

Her kitchen chairs were equipales that took you in like a hug, which I needed.

How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!

Lou Ann's life was ruled by the fear of salmonella, to the extent that she claimed the only safe way to eat potato salad was to stick your head in the refrigerator and eat it in there.

The end was always curled up there between us, like a sleeping cat, present even in our love-making.

As if it's only by hurting yourself that you can be true.

Béene-béene.' 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. If Anatole can wrap all my rattlebone sins in a blanket and call me goodness itself, why then I'll just believe him.

As I planted the beans, Turtle followed me down the row digging each one up after I planted it and putting it back in the jar. "Good girl," I said. I could see a whole new era arriving in Turtle's and my life.