Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

as long as you're living with an addict, you're addicted.

The article I haven't enclosed, but you know the kind of thing: "in attendance were Trotskyites, Teamsters, Socialist professors and old-line Quakers, the crackpot fringes of public opinion, hoping to arouse draft resistance while praying for an easy way out." In other words, the kind of thing you and

What matters in a story is the heart of its hero.

Most families would sooner forgive you for going to prison than for moving out of Lee County.

These are more dangerous times than we ever have known.

U.S. policies restrict feeding cow tissue directly to other cows, but still allow cows to be fed to other animals (like chickens) and the waste from the chickens to be fed back to the cows.

It is grand to walk down the rows dumping armloads of moldy grass glop onto the faces of your less favorite heads of state: a year in review, already starting to compost.

If I got to make just one law, it would be that the men who make the decisions to drop bombs would first, every time, have to spend one whole day taking care of a baby. We were not made to do this killing thing. I swear. Back up. It's a big mistake.

I suppose it is in our nature," she said finally. "When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order." "If that is our nature, then nature is madness.

As the storm moved closer it broke into hundreds of pieces so that the rain fell here and there from the high clouds in long, curving gray plumes.

Now I would be one of the working kids. I had a list going in my head that fall, of what all I would tell my little brother one day. But time passed and eventually my mind had only one thought in it as regards childhood. For any kid that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it's going to fucking leave you and not come back.

I never put real people into my fiction - I can't see the slightest point of that, when I have the alternative of inventing utterly subservient slave-people, whose every detail of appearance and behavior I can bend to serve my theme and plot.

Anything in her mother's handwriting she saved. Willa wanted her also to go on weighing something in the world.

Zola wrote that the mendacity of the press could be divided into two groups: the yellow press lies every day without hesitating. But others, like the Times, speak the truth on all inconsequential occasions, so they can deceive the public with the requisite authority when it becomes necessary.

Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don't, but we wear it all the same.

How had she not seen all this? Willa was the one who raised her anxiety shield against every family medical checkup or late-night ring of the phone, expecting the worst so life couldn't blindside them.

She was the crisis handler, he was the evader.

pricking ourselves, sharing our blood to promise brotherhood. As if it's only by hurting yourself that you can be true.

said, sounding a little nervous. "Skipping ahead to Everyday Necessities. Try your best to buy reused.

the minute they put down the teething ring and found the Internet, you were useless as a source of anything but shoes and a winter coat.

center, in bigger print: And if I die no soul will pity me. And why should they since I myself find in myself no pity to myself. I asked what it was

That's just old people shit," I told her. "The cost of doing business with them. They've got their rock-hard stools and dried-up old poon, what else are they going to wave in your face? They press the know-it-all thing as their sole advantage.

Like the saying goes: They passed out the brains, he thought they said trains and he missed his.

All down the years, words have been flung like pieces of shit, only to get stuck on a truck bumper with up-yours pride. Rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables.