Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (172 Quotes)

You don't ask questions of an attic

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

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.

Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom.

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.

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.

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.

I'm too fascinated to hide indoors or stay cooped up in our yard. Curiosity killed the cat, I know, but I try to land on my feet.

The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.

The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earring on sad, rich widows

The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.

You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own.

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

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

How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.

She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn't.

My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.

Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.

You think you're the foreigner here, and I'm the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner, too.

Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.

This Forest eats itself and lives forever.

The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

The effect is both domestic and wild, equal parts geometric and chaotic. It's the visual signature of small, diversified farms that creates the picture-postcard landscape here, along with its celebrated gastronomic one. Couldn't Americans learn to love landscapes like these around our cities, treasuring them not just gastronomically but aesthetically, instead of giving everything over to suburban development? Can we only love agriculture on postcards?

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

Most of the girls my age, or even younger, have babies. They appear way too young to be married, till you look in their eyes. Then you'll see it. Their eyes look happy and sad at the same time, but unexcited by anything, shifting easily off to the side as if they've already seen most of what there is. Married eyes.

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.

And here is the shocking plot twist: as farmers produced those extra calories, the food industry figured out how to get them into the bodies of people who didn't really want to eat 700 more calories a day.

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