Barbara Kingsolver
80 quotes
Biography
Barbara Ellen Kingsolver is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. Her widely known works include The Poisonwood Bible, the tale of a missionary family in the Congo; and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a nonfiction account of her family's attempts to eat locally.
"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."
"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."
"Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you’re good, bad things can still happen. And if you’re bad, you can still be lucky."
"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. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof."
"God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves."
"What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness."
"I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book."
"A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name."
"Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace."
"I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which... is at home at the moment."
"To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know."
"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."
"I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint, stirring breeze. The scent trail shifts, causing the predator to miss the pounce. One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires."
"Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history."
"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 its feet and go bake bread. It didn't occur to them to feel sorry for themselves."
"He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. "Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes."
"I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign. I'm not lying. He got stuck up there. About nineteen people congregated during the time it took for Norman Strick to walk up to the Courthouse and blow the whistle for the volunteer fire department. They eventually did come with the ladder and haul him down, and he wasn't dead but lost his hearing and in many other ways was never the same afterward. They said he overfilled the tire."
"A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars."
"Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed."
"I also love to travel, and am especially thrilled to see different tracts of wilderness that are still thriving on our planet. A lot of us spend our best efforts trying to reclaim what’s damaged, imagining and working to fend off the dire outcomes of humanity’s mistakes. To spend our hearts without filling them up again is a dangerous economy. So I go to the wilds to repair my soul. Earlier this year I spent several weeks in , a vast, unpeopled land where I walked trails among s, s, and s. I watched pumas eating guanacos. A wilderness big enough to support a healthy population of 200-pound predators: that is a wonder."
"The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here."
"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."
"He was wounded. I suppose some sharp thing in me wanted to sting him, for making me need him now. After he'd once cut me to the edge of what a soul will bear. But that was senseless.... I looked at this grown-up Loyd and tried to make sense of him, seeing clearly that he was too sweet to survive around me. I would go to my grave expecting the weapon in the empty hand."
"Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off."
"Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life."