Barbara Kingsolver famous quotes

If I had to give up my life for anything, it would have to have the resilience of hope, the elation of new literacy, the brilliant life of a field of flowers, the elementary kindness of bread. Nothing short of that. It would have to be something as sure as love.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Kindness #Giving Up #Flower

Nine-tenths of human law is about possession.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Law #Nine #Possession

I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Summer #Thinking #Poetry

Plants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It's just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Photography #Animal #Making Love

If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.  That's not gallons, but barrels.  Small changes in buying habits can make big differences.  Becoming a less energy-dependent nation may just need to start with a good breakfast.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Country #Oil #Differences

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.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Animal #People #House

The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Blessing #Appreciate #Childhood

I can count all the ways in which being a mother has enriched my understanding of the world, of character, my sense of the future and my attachment to it. I can't imagine what kind of writer I'd be if I didn't have my kids.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Mother #Kids #Character

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#People #Humanity #Fiction

I used to think religion was just more of the same thing. Dump responsibility on the big guy. Now I see an importance in that. It's a relief to accept that not everything is under your control.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Responsibility #Thinking #Guy

Oh, that river of wishes, the slippery crocodile dream of it, how it might have carried my body down through all the glittering sand bars to the sea.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Dream #Sea #Rivers

Parenting is something that happens mostly while you're thinking of something else.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Thinking

organization is the religion of the single parent.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Organization #Parent #Single Parent

It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Water #Growing #Safe

The first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see. Presumably the unselfish motives will follow as we wise up.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Wise #Appreciation #Selfish

I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Memorable #Dresses

Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Ada inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Balance #Trying #Ada

This Forest eats itself and lives forever.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Forever #Forests

Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Notebook #Writing #Silence

When people are frightened about going hungry and paying their mortgages, a scarcity model begins to prevail; they fear someone else will get their piece of the pie.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Pie #People #Scarcity

you can't really know the person standing before you, because always there is some missing piece
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Missing #Pieces #Persons

He needs to go rub his soul against life.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Soul #Needs

Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he's entitled to joy rather than submission?
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Men #Joy #Doe

You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Book #Imagination #Waiting

The past is all we know of the future.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Past

Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Life #Inspiring #Perfect

Southern Appalachians have been ridiculed since the country began. In fiction, they're usually depicted in a cartoonish manner. The region is poor, and very suspicious of outsiders, so there's a sort of 'us versus them' situation. They're easy to poke fun at.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Country #Fun #Southern

Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Believe #Luck #Deserve

Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Different #Body #Kind

In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career - my anti-job - that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Jobs #Stress #Careers

Human manners are wildly inconsistent; plenty of people have said so. But this one takes the cake: the manner in which we're allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point that out. The conspicious consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spirtual error, or even bad manners.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Eye #Cake #Errors

God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Children #Men #Doe

She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Swimming #Rocks #Found

The way I see it, a person isn't nothing more than a scarecrow... The only difference between one that stands up good and one that blows over is what kind of a stick they're stuck up there on.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Blow #Differences #Sticks

If you're standing in the manure pile, it's somebody's job to mention the stink.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Jobs #Stink #Standing

The last generation's worst fears became the next one's B-grade entertainment.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Generations #Lasts #Next

Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Years #Cost #Minutes

This will be Great Mam's last spring. Her last June apples. Her last fresh roasting ears from the garden.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Spring #Garden #June

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Book #Bird #Want

the novel is inherently a political instrument, regardless of its subject. It invites you - more than invites you, induces you - to live inside another person's skin. It creates empathy. And that's the antidote to bigotry. The novel doesn't just tell you about another life, which is what a newspaper would do. It makes you live another life, inhabit another perspective. And that's very important.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Perspective #Empathy #Political

It's as if cats live in a seperate universe that takes up the same space as ours, but is full of facinating things like mice or sparrows or special TV programs that we can't see.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Cat #Space #Special

Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Given #Circumstances #Turns

We agreed with him in principal - we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Children #Magic #Littles

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for!
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Anticipation #Life Is #Figures

Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Endurance #Wonder #Currency

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.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Dream #Running #Dog

That's how it is: some people are content to wait till you ask, while others jump right in with the whole story.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#People #Waiting #Stories

He had senile dementia and liked to go outside naked, but he could still do two things perfectly: win at checkers and write out prescriptions.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Funny #Writing #Winning

Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Might #Today #Dirt

Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Zero #Writing #Trying

What keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I’m not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Book #Fall #Rocks

It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Writing #Political #Fiction

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#People #Empathy #Literature

I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Art #Political #Failing

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.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Morning #Stupid #Car

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.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Baby #Bird #Tree

Like Daniel she enteres the lions' den, but lacking Daniel's pure and unblemished soul, Ada is spiced with the flavors of vice that make for a tasty meal. Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Soul #Vices #Meals

Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Moving #School #Home

The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Impossible

It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Love #Wise #Struggle

The reason most people have kids is because they get pregnant.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Children #Kids #People

Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Wise #Odds #Smoking

Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can't persist much longer. If it does, then we won't.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Ideas #Feelings #Doe

Mom is losing, no doubt, because our vegetables have come to lack two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. Storage and transport take predictable tolls on the volatile plant compounds that subtly add up to taste and food value. Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to decrease palatability. Bizarre as it seems, we've accepted a tradeoff that amounts to: "Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of its former self."
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Mom #Self #Vegetables

My way of finding a place in this world is to write one.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Writing #World #Way

Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Human Nature #Humans

The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Progress #Matter #March

Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Children #Seven #Minutes

A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Hands #Wife #Earth

I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Writing #Novelists #Fiction

Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin...
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Magic #Skins #Fiction

I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Virginia #Farmers

There are days when I am envious of my hens: when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Life #Eggs #Perfect

my own relationships with the animals in my life are absurdly complex: Some I love, some I eat, and the scraps left over from the ones I eat, I feed to the ones I love.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Animal #Eating #Scrap

I never think that anything I'm writing is bluntly political in any way. I'm not going for commentary.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Writing #Thinking #Political

Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Running #Color #Water

I don't bring expectations to any of my books. I don't tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Book #People #Expectations

To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct. Baser even than hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty. If the whole world of the living has to turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Hate #Voice #Hopeful

What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Running #And Love #Woods

Our plans are small and somewhat absurd.
-- Barbara Kingsolver

#Absurd #Plans