Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

She'll follow the river south through Lake Havasu City, where some rich person, she has heard, actually bought the London Bridge and shipped it over block by block to stand lonely in the desert.

The Peggot aunts must have seized the equipment because the music was oldies, Michael Jackson and Prince.

but born in the mobile home, so that's like the Eagle Scout of trailer trash.

Here in the eastern woodlands we have the black, common, tulip, and white morels, and one unfortunate little cousin called (I am so sorry) the Dog Pecker.

eating home-cooked meals from whole, in-season ingredients obtained from the most local source available is eating well, in every sense. Good for the habitat, good for the body.

realized that I had come to my own terms with the desert, but my soul was thirsty.

But he went right back to it, trying again. He would do this over and over until he had it, and today or tomorrow he would walk. Willa remembered all this. She'd watched her kids master these first small tasks with an application of effort that seemed superhuman, but of course it only amounted to being human, a story written in genes. First they would stagger, then grow competent, and then forget the difficulty altogether while thinking of other things, and that was survival.

how ridiculous it was. There is no point in treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, There now, hang on, you'll get over it. Sadness is more or less like a head cold—with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

At the first sign of winter the trees began to die. Leaves and aborted fruits fell in thick, brittle handfuls like the hair of a cancer patient. The abundance of sun and warmth, which we thought would never end, had led the trees on too, promising the impossible. But now the daylight grew thin and they showed no will to live. A dead sea of leaves drifted deep and undisturbed on the orchard floors. No children played there. I spent a lot of time considering the mystery of my family tree.

One other person can go a long way towards making your world right," she said, "but the support has to run both ways.

When someone mattered like that, you didn't lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.

Still no internet with all the ways of saying, Let's us be better than those guys so we can hate on them. Our school had two computers in the library, one that worked.

people's complaints about their siblings only as a primal form of bragging. They had a tribe. They belonged.

Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they are missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven. The choreography of many people working in one kitchen is, by itself, a certain definition of family, after people have made their separate ways home to be together.

The sun is all you wait for, the light, guardian saint of all the children who lie like death on the wake of the household crime. You stop your heart like a clock: these hours are not your own. You hide your life away, the lucky coin tucked quickly in the shoe from the burglar, when he Comes. Because he will, as sure as shoes.

A wife had greater wants, naturally, and could do nothing to help her own situation.

Recently it has been decided, grudgingly, that dark skin or lameness may not be entirely one's fault, but one still ought to show the good manners to act ashamed.

Her mark on history: the female acquaintance.

Why, Dr. Livingstone, I presume, wasn't he the rascal! He and all the profiteers who've since walked out on Africa as a husband quits a wife, leaving her with her naked body curled around the emptied-out mine of her womb. I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience. I

July being God's month.

You feel like you'll never run into another one that's worth turning your head around for, but you will. You'll see." "No

Even a language won't stand still.

the all-consuming nothingness and everythingness of an infant.

Sometimes I still have American dreams. I mean literally. I see microwave ovens and exercise machines and grocery-store shelves with thirty brands of shampoo, and I look at these things oddly, in my dream. I stand and I think, 'What is all this for? What is the hunger that drives this need?' I think it's fear.