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Barbara Kingsolver Quotes | Quotes said by Barbara Kingsolver

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #1

    ...animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #2

    ...I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them...

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #3

    ...The question is, why do you think you can't be a writer?
    To be a writer, you need readers.
    I'm no painter, then. Who ever looks at my little dumb pieces of shit?

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #4

    ...whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. And peace will be with you.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #5

    ...when the public nerve is aroused, the most impressive capacity of man is his skill for lying.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #6

    \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.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #7

    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.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #8

    A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #9

    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.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #10

    A journalist's job is to collect information, Ovid said to Pete.
    Nope, Pete said. That's what we do. It's not what they do.
    Dellarobia was unready to be pushed out of the conversation just like that. Then what do you think the news people drive their Jeeps all the way out here for?
    To shore up the prevailing view of their audience and sponsors.
    Pete takes a dim view of his fellow humans, Ovid said. He prefers insects.
    Dellarobia turned her chair halfway around to face Pete, scraping noisily against the cement floor. You're saying people only tune in to news they know they're going to agree with?
    Bingo, said Pete.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #11

    A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #12

    A novel works it's magic by putting a reader inside another person's life. The pace is as slow as life. It's as detailed as life. It requires you, the reader, to fill in an outline of words with vivid pictures drawn subconsciously from your own life, so that the story feels more personal than the sets designed by someone else and handed over via TV or movies. Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up. It's why you might find yourself crying, even if you aren't the crying kind.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #13

    a single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. and, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. this forest eats itself and lives forever.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #14

    A territory is only possessed for a moment in time.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #15

    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.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #16

    As a dinner guest I gratefully eat just about anything that's set before me, because graciousness among friends is dearer to me than any other agenda.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #17

    Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity *after* their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it's the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #18

    Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #19

    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 Quote #20

    But I'll tell you a secret. When I want to take God at his word exactly I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #21

    But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation's hopes will die with it, and no cumulative progress is possible for the human will.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #22

    But newspapers have a duty to truth,' Van said.
    Lev clucked his tongue. 'They tell the truth only as the exception. Zola wrote that the mendacity of the press could be divided into two groups: the yellow press lies every day without hesitating. But others, like the Times, speak the truth on all inconsequential occasions, so they can deceive the public with the requisite authority when it becomes necessary.'
    Van got up from his chair to gather the cast-off newspapers. Lev took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. 'I don't mean to offend the journalists; they aren't any different from other people. They're merely the megaphones of the other people.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #23

    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. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she's gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock my the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She's the one you can't put down.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #24

    Cooking is the great divide between good eating and bad. The gains are quantifiable. Cooking and eating at home - even with quality ingredients - costs pennies on the dollar compared with meals prepared by a restaurant or factory.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #25

    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.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #26

    Each food items in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles....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.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #27

    Eating is a genuine need, continuous from our first day to our last, amounting over time to our most significant statement of what we are made of and what we have chosen to make of our connection to home ground.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #28

    Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #29

    Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.

  • Barbara Kingsolver Quote #30

    Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side. Betrayal is a friend I have known a long time, a two-faced goddess looking forward and back with a clear, earnest suspicion of good fortune.

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