Top 500 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

Featured in: Emotion Quotes, Resilience Quotes, Not Giving Up Quotes, Quotes About Hope

2. “Loose lips sink ships.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

3. “There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

4. “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.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

5. “A mother can be only as happy as her unhappiest child.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

6. “The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

7. “Maybe life doesn’t get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we’re willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

8. “Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

9. “Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

10. “Everything you’re sure is right can be wrong in another place.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

11. “Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

12. “In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

13. “There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, ‘There now, hang on, you’ll get over it.’ Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

14. “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.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

Featured in: Destination Quotes

15. “Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

16. “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

17. “I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

18. “Don’t wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

19. “Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

20. “From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

21. “If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

22. “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.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

23. “Unsheltered, I live in daylight. And like the wandering bird I rest in thee.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

24. “I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

26. “War so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

27. “I suppose it is in our nature,” she said finally. “When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

28. “If you’re writing, you’re a writer. If you’re talking about it or thinking about it, I’m not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

29. “Crisis is opportunity.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

30. “School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

31. “There’s always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

32. “I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

33. “Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

34. “Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

35. “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

36. “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.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

37. “Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

38. “It’s what you do that makes your soul.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

39. “Sadness is more or less like a head cold – with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

40. “It’s frightening when things you love appear suddenly changed from what you have always known.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

41. “I knew Rome was burning, but I had just enough water to scrub the floors, so I did what I could.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

42. “The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

44. “The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

45. “Silence has many advantages. When you do not speak, other people presume you to be deaf or feeble-minded and promptly make a show of their own limitations.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

46. “The truth needs so little rehearsal.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

48. “You don’t think you’ll live past it and you don’t really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that’s still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

49. “I’ve always seen the world through the eyes of a scientist. I love the predictable outcomes that science gives us, the control over the world that that can render.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

50. “No matter what kind of night you’re having, morning always wins.”

— Barbara Kingsolver