Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

But Dovey was one of those people who traveled in a medium-size pod of tardiness on which others came to rely.

Overjoyed, null and void, mongoloid. I still have a fellow feeling for that almond-tasting word. Oh, but it did unsettle the matrons of Bethlehem to see the poor thing boosted into a class ahead of their own children, there to become dazzlingly slick-quick at mathematics.

You lie down with snakes, you get up with the urge to bite back.

Writing, which was both painful and palliative for me, turned out to be my own way of giving blood in a crisis. I can only hope this unit of words will have a longer shelf life than the forty-two days of a unit of blood, as this critical time blends seamlessly into the next one.

Father stared at the trees, giving no indication he'd heard his poor frightened wife, or any of this news. Father would sooner watch us all perish one by one than listen to anybody but himself.

People want somebody to kick around, I get that. But why is it us? Why couldn't it be, I don't know, a Dakota or something? Why not Florida?

I read what Hallie said about not wanting to save the world, that you didn't choose your road for the reward at the end, but for the way it felt as you went along.

At its heart, a genuine food culture is an affinity between people and the land that feeds them.

My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There's no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.

What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness.

This marriage has failed to warm her.

There was hardly anything left of that huge lunch but greasy fingers and a crackle of anise between the teeth. The wine bottle was empty. "Mostly? I believe people want to eat a good lunch, and then take a good piss.

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

Maggot took credit for that deed so I wouldn't get sent home and skinned alive. Mrs. Peggot pretended to take his word for it, even though she heard the whole thing. Probably everybody has had some golden patch of life like that, where everything was going to be okay thanks to the people that had your back, and sadly you wasted it, by being ticked off over some ignorant thing like a busted TV.

The loudest sound on the earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.

I love it for what it tells me about life. I love fiction, strangely enough, for how true it is, If it can tell me something I didn't already know, or maybe suspected but never framed quite that way, or never before had sock me so divinely in the solar plexus, that was a story worth a read.

A car had pulled in, and the guy getting out of it was the weirdest-looking human I ever saw, not counting comic books. Stick legs, long white arms, long busy fingers that twined all over him. Running through his hair, wrapping around his elbows while he stood looking around the parking lot. A redhead, but not my tribe. He was the deathly white type with the pinkish hair and no eyebrows. That skin that looks like it will burn if you stare at it.

When a house no longer provided shelter, it turned out to be worth exactly the sum of its parts.

but in better days she was always one to tell me I should start trusting the wild ride, meaning life or whatever. Because it's not one hundred percent fucked up, once in a while it delivers.

Daddy and I got married kind of accidentally.

He reads next to nothing. It might interfere with his knowledge of the universe.

Never be mean in anything. Never be false. Never be cruel. I can always be hopeful of you. If that was from him to me, it was more man-to-man talk than I'd ever had in life so far.

She needs some proof that she isn't the last woman left on earth, the surviving queen of nothing.

if she really wanted to read an article about sailboat building she'd written twenty years ago, which she definitely did not. But giving up the physical record of all that work felt like a kind of death. Online wasn't enough. She wanted it to weigh something.