Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

Mama says their skin bears scars different from ours because their skin is a map of all the sorrows in their lives.

times than we ever have known.

All the noise in my brain. I clamp it to the page so it will be still.

Whole phases of her children's lives, these passions that had seemed to be their purest marrow, had faded away one after another. And character persisted.

What is new is that we now know so very much about the world, or at least the part of it that is most picturesquely exploding on any given day, that we're left with a desperate sense that all of it is exploding, all the time.

The first time I went in, he didn't notice me because of reading a book. Not regular reading, I mean gone. He and that big book were not in this house, nor maybe this world.

You wind up meeting in the middle on this follow-your-heart thing, at a place everybody can live with. Show me that universe on TV or the movies. Mountain people, country and farm people, we are nowhere the hell. It's a situation, being invisible. You can get to a point of needing to make the loudest possible noise just to see if you are still alive.

Kids aren't the problem. It's parents. There's this whole little Armstrong haters' club that's practically a task force of the PTA. They won't admit to being bigots, so they want him fired for being a communist. Like they even know what a communist is!" I said probably they were just scared he was going to put ideas in our heads. She smiled. "Imagine that. A teacher, putting ideas in kids' heads.

Golden children ran wild over a field of dead great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, and the bones must have wanted to rise up and knock together and rattle with joy. I have never seen a town that gave so much—so much of what counts—to its children. More than anything else I wished I belonged to one of these living, celebrated families, lush as plants, with bones in the ground for roots. I wanted pollen on my cheeks and one of those calcium ancestors to decorate as my own.

No man wants to hear he has been a fool.

on the weekends. He'd mentioned a place called Sweet Briar where he met other scientists. She felt the trailer's absence

They're actually damming the river to avoid paying fines to the Environmental Protection Agency, isn't that right? Because the river is so polluted with acid?

All this was making me hanker to go take more pills. Sick as that is. I wondered if Emmy knew how deep I was in. But she was wrapped up in her own shit. She said in Knoxville, June could refer these patients someplace for help, but here their insurance only covered the pills.

Teenage boys were just a loose aggregation of appetites.

was pretty upset about it. Getting used to all new everything was screwing with my head. Clothes, people, house. The one thing I could still count on was being an idiot. Now I was supposed to trash what little there was left of Demon and be smart. Would I still be me? And

The giant beech next door intends to shiver off every hair of its pelt.

One problem with democracy as it plays in our country is that the majority rules so hard; we seem bent on dividing all things into a contest of Win and Lose, and declaring that the Losers are losers. Nearly half of us are routinely asked to disappear while the slim majority works its will. But the playing field is the planet earth, and I for one have no place else to go.

And the men, they might be good men but they wouldn't do it. They'd be scared to, I think. Or they don't see no need. These men don't see how we got to do something right now. They think the trees can die and we can just go somewhere else, and as long as we fry up the bacon for them in the same old pan, they think it would be…" she faltered, hugging her elbows in earnest…"that it would be home.

If anybody else had ever wanted me happy, they could have fooled me. Possibly Mom, as long as it didn't cross tracks with her own maneuvers. That's all people really want, for you to fit into their maneuvers.

Growth every quarter is the only success that matters to investors. The drive to expand is the engine of the economy.

Something in his nature just did not expect good things in store.

He doesn't even look at her because there is too much there, and he's afraid. She is his first child, his favorite, every mistake he ever made.

Oh, it's a fine and useless enterprise, trying to fix destiny. That trail leads straight back to the time before we ever lived, and into that deep well it's easy to cast curses like stones on our ancestors. But that's nothing more than cursing ourselves and all that made us. Had I not married a preacher named Nathan Price, my particular children would never have seen the light of this world. I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, and learned to love what I could lose

Low coal" was working thirty-six-inch-tall seams, stooping under a mountain. The Pappaw stories were mostly along the lines of: How awesome was that, us busting our asses. Whereas the Mammaw stories leaned more towards, not awesome. Getting your paycheck in fake money that you had to use in the coal company's stores that charged you double. Breathing black dust all day, coughing up black hunks of lung all night. Husband and sons all dying in one day in a shaft that blew up.