Quotes from Barbara Kingsolver

Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.

I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. Even the child Ruth May touched history. Everyone is complicit. The okapi complied by living, and the spider by dying. It would have lived if it could. Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger.

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

Last time I talked to her she didn't sound like herself. She's depressed. It's awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they're no good.

Morning always comes.

Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.

I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.

I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them...

I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever.

Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.

He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

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.

Love weighs nothing.

Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.

If the Lord hasn't got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that's his business.

I had decided early on that if I couldn't dress elegant, I'd dress memorable.

I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.

It's terrible to lose somebody, but it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse.

The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering. Yes, maybe we'd like to be able to get places quickly, and carry things in both hands, but only because we have to keep up with the rest of you. We would rather be just like us , and have that be all right.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.

You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It's what these guys have decided to call America. They have the audacity to say, 'There, you sons of bitches, don't lay a finger on it. That is a finished product.' But any country is still in the making. Always. That's just history, people have to see that.