Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.

It's frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.

There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.

If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which... is at home at the moment.

Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.

But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.

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.

Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.

Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job...And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct...Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.

I lost a child, she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.

Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.

At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.

If you never stepped on anybody's toes, you never been for a walk.

Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.

The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.

The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.

Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.