Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

today's problems can't be solved by today's people, we just keep shoring up our bankruptcy with the only tools we know. Making up more and more complicated stories about how we haven't failed.

because anything to do with improving the life of a child is on the bottom.

I was exhausted but also for the first time in weeks I felt sleepiness, that rare, delicious liqueur, soaking into my body like blotter paper.

Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behavior in children, and medicate it in adults? That

She breathed in slowly; this was what she had, the beauty of this awful night. She listened for small yips in the distance, something to put in her heart besides the lost phoebes and the dread of another full moon rising with no more small celebrations from her body ever again. She kept herself still and tried to think of coyote children emerging from the forest's womb with their eyes wide open while the finite possibilities of her own children closed their eyes, finally, on this world.

The better part of friendship might be holding one's tongue over the prospect of self-made wreckage.

Three hundred fifty parts per million," he replied. "The number of carbon molecules the atmosphere can hold, and still maintain the ordinary thermal balance. It's an important figure.

The upshot of all this talking was me getting pretty much in love with Emmy. She was beautiful and like a grown person.

If it had been July, my heart already would have cracked for the beauty. As it was, I might die of loneliness.

by This Organic Life, a compelling book by Joan Dye Gussow that tells how, and more important why, she aspired

A quality diet is not an elitist option for the do-it-yourselfer. Globally speaking, people consume more soft drinks and packaged foods as they grow more affluent; home-cooked meals of fresh ingredients are the mainstay of rural, less affluent people. This link between economic success and nutritional failure has become so widespread, it has a name: the nutrition transition.

My first question: Is Knoxville near the ocean. Answer: Wrong direction.

being dead seemed a lot like not being born yet, and I hadn't especially minded that.

It divided me from the people I knew, then and later, but in broader human terms I don't pretend that it sets me apart in any great way. A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, and so people imagine that a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had

Love changes everything. I never suspected it would be so. Requited love, I should say ...

But mother wanted to consume me like food. I needed my won room. I needed books, and for the first time in my life I needed schoolmasters who would tell me each day what to think about.

All the richest men in Mexico were once lifted from the cradle by servants. But they all drink from the same water jar that fills the master's glass, and they use the same chamber pot, still warm from the piss of the patrón. In Mexico nobody ever thought to keep those streams flowing separately.

The Marines aren't rooting for the new society. The U.S. is paying the contras, the guys that attack the farmers." Hallie would not laugh now, she would be inflamed. She said we were a nation in love with forgetting the facts.

When everybody around you thinks the same way, you can't even see what you're believing in.

We stalled long enough for Maggot to undisgrace himself

Like I'm doing right now?" I perked up, thinking

Five days and the train has passed through many underworlds.

Why do you suppose the poets talk about hearts?' he asked me suddenly. 'When they discuss emotional damage? The tissue of hearts is tough as a shoe. Did you ever sew up a heart?

I told him I wasn't going to live like my mom did, letting everybody tell her she was worthless. I'd stayed alive so far by standing on my own feet, and wasn't about to give that up now.