Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (172 Quotes)

Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.

Mi'ija, in a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is to make things as right as we can.

For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.

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

My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.

The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

In my opinion, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from a greaty height.

What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness.

Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.

We can´t know what we haven´t been taught

That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don't know how a person could ever describe that scent.

For six years, from age nineteen until I turned twenty-five, I did not sleep uninterrupted through a single night. . . . I felt lucky to get my shoes on the right feet. . . . I moved forward only, thinking each morning anew that we were leaving the worst behind.

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

Nathan was something that happened to us, as devastating in its way as the burning roof that fell on the family Mwanza; with our fate scarred by hell and brimstone we still had to track our course. And it happened finally by the grace of hell and brimstone that I had to keep moving. I moved, and he stood still.

The forest eats itself and lives forever

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.

What keeps you going isn't just some fine destination but the road you're on and the fact you know how to drive.

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.

What kind of weirdo makes cheese? It's too hard to imagine, too homespun, too something. We're so alienated from the creation of even ordinary things we eat or use, each one seems to need its own public relations team to calm the American subservience to hurry and bring us back around to doing a thing ourselves, at home.

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.

For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers with heavy heads. You can shield them with your body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but they'll still move toward him. Without cease they'll bend to his light.

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.

No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.

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

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.

What we suffered in our lives we went through together, but somehow we came out different doors, on different ground levels.

Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.

You can't save the whales by eating whales, but paradoxically, you can help save rare, domesticated foods by eating them. They're kept alive by gardeners who have a taste for them, and farmers who know they'll be able to sell them. The consumer becomes a link in this conservation chain by seeking out the places where heirloom vegetables are sold, taking them home, whacking them up with knives, and learning to incorporate their exceptional tastes into personal and family expectations.

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.

Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man's skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people's back yards.

Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.

Nobody had planted these flowers, I felt sure, nor harvested them either; these were works that the Lord had gone ahead and finished on His own. He must have lacked faith in mankind's follow-through capabilities, on the day he created flowers.

This Forest eats itself and lives forever.

My thoughts kept straying onto random paths...hoping to get lost in a thicket.

When we came home from the movie Hallie cried. Not because of the people who gave up life and limb only to lose Spain to Franco, and not for the ones who came back and were harassed for the rest of their lives for being Reds. The tragedy for Hallie was that there might never be a cause worth risking everything for in our lifetime.

If you ask me, that's reason enough to keep a kitchen at the center of a family's life, as a place to understand favorite foods as processes, not just products.

A bird in the hand loses its mystery in no time flat.

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.

Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!

In exchange for his first taste of powdered milk, Pascal showed me a tree we could climb to find a bird's nest. After we handled and examined the pink-skinned baby birds, he popped one of them into his mouth like a jujube. It seemed to please him a lot. He offered a baby bird to me, pantomiming that I should eat it. I understood perfectly well what he meant, but I refused. He did not seem disappointed to have to eat the whole brood himself.

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.

To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.

On Sunday morning I put on jeans, changed into a denim dress, then back into jeans again, feeling stupid. I can get into a mood where I annoy myself to no end. At the moment when I got completely fed up and stopped caring, I had on jeans and a white cotton shirt and silver earrings, so that's what I wore. And yes, I'll admit it, nice underwear.

Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they're afraid to plant themselves?

Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.

A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.

A territory is only possessed for a moment in time.

God doesn't need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.

In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had- A Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they'd sooner imagine a tree that could pull up it's feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.