Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (172 Quotes)

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.

What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

Codi Gives you the willies, doesn't it The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop referring to cliff dwellings Loyd No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

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

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope.

People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

Patriotism threatens free speech with death. In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder. Who are we calling terrorists

Terms like that, "Humane Society," are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

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.

Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view.

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

Why does a person even get up in the morning You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.

There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.