Top 500 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Her every possession was either unbreakable, or broken.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

452. “As the storm moved closer it broke into hundreds of pieces so that the rain fell here and there from the high clouds in long, curving gray plumes. It looked like maybe fifty or sixty fires scattered over the city, except that the tall, smoky columns were flowing in reverse.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

453. “Religion has no place in the science classroom, where it may abridge students’ opportunities to learn the methods, discoveries, and explanatory hypotheses of science. Rather, its place is in the hearts of the men and women who study and then practice scientific exploration. Ethics can’t influence the outcome of an experiment, but they can serve as a useful adjunct to the questions that get asked in the first place, and to the applications thereafter.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

454. “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

455. “Don’t count on it. There’s a lot of white folks out there hanging on to their God-given right to look down on some other class of people.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

456. “Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick to them.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

457. “I don’t know where to start, Lou Ann,” I told her. “There’s just so damn much ugliness. Everywhere you look, some big guy kicking some little person when they’re down – look what they do to those people at Mattie’s. To hell with them, people say, let them die, it was their fault in the first place for being poor or in trouble, or for not being white, or whatever, how dare they try to come to this country.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

458. “A life was a life. She’d been orphaned at an age to internalize death as poor material for a joke. And likewise, salvation.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

459. “Scientists are not like other people, sir. We cannot slam our portals. We have to follow evidence where it leads, even if no one likes that place. Even if it suggests that all we have ever believed might be mistaken.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

460. “The longer you live, the more likely you are to have something to say.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

461. “When the rain pours down especially, we have long hours of captivity, in which my sisters determinedly grow bored. But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them. Everyone else will finish with the singular plowing through, and Ada still has discoveries ahead and behind.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

462. “It’s frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets rough you fall back on whatever awful think you grew up with.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

463. “How would you even begin to make a hush puppy, what in the world was in one? Nothing to do with a puppy, surely. Garnett had long known, though he didn’t much like to admit it, that God’s world and the better part of daily life were full of mysteries known only to women.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

464. “Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

465. “Think of all the duties that were perfectly obvious to Paul or Matthew in that old Arabian desert that are pure nonsense to us now. All that foot washing, for example. Was it really for God’s glory or just to keep the sand out of the house?”

— Barbara Kingsolver

466. “This is all going to scare us to death,” she said. “You and me. But we’re still going to have to do it.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

467. “The guys in charge of everything right now are so old. They really are, Mom. Older than you. They figured out the meaning of life in, I guess, the nineteen fifties and sixties. When it looked like there would always be plenty of everything. And they’re applying that to now. It’s just so ridiculous.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

468. “Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

469. “He spoke for an hour on the nonviolent road to independence. The crowd loved it so much they rioted and killed twelve people.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

470. “If people played their channels right, they could be spared from disagreement for the length of their natural lives. Finally she got it. The need for so many channels.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

471. “Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it’s going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

472. “I never think that anything I’m writing is bluntly political in any way. I’m not going for commentary.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

473. “We’re genetically predisposed toward certain behaviors that we’ve collectively decided are unhelpful; adultery and racism are possible examples. With reasonable success, we mitigate those impulses through civil codes, religious rituals, maternal warnings – the whole bag of tricks we call culture.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

474. “There are some who’d hardly lift a finger for kindness, but they would haul up a load of rock to dump on some soul they think’s been too lucky.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

475. “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

476. “Our plans are small and somewhat absurd.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

477. “People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

478. “People ask without wanting to know.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

479. “Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission, and it is treated with far less consideration.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

480. “He needs to go rub his soul against life.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

481. “She laid the side of her face against his frail old heart, where the pink shell of her ear could capture whatever song it had left.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

482. “In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it’s one of the few kinds of writing that doesn’t tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We’re surrounded by advertising.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

483. “White is not an origin. It’s a mental construct of privilege.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

484. “I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

485. “Tig was a unique element with all valences open.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

486. “Was it normal now for parents to operate in the dark? She never knew what was fair to ask.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

487. “I’m out of the habit. I’ve spent years trying not to want. Just, you know, as an endeavor, like quitting smoking.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

488. “As to the career of avoiding making enemies. You can’t dig any burrow deep enough. Might as well stand and look them in the eye.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

489. “Teaching struck Willa as a saintly calling, especially given the pay. But even saints shouldn’t be stuck with intro classes forever.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

490. “I made it to the childbearing phase without TV dependence, then looked around and thought, Well gee, why start now? Why get a pet python on the day you decide to raise fuzzy little gerbils?”

— Barbara Kingsolver

491. “To think is not always to see.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

492. “I’m always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

493. “Last time I talked to her she didn’t sound like herself. She’s depressed. It’s awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they’re no good.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

494. “They saw that even the crooked girl believed her own life was precious. That is what it means to be a beast in the kingdom.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

495. “Zeke embodied the contradiction of his generation: jaded about the fate of the world, idealistic about personal prospects.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

496. “I grew up aware of all the people I depended on and who depended on me.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

497. “I read in a book that they cut off the workers’ hands if they hadn’t collected enough rubber by the end of the day. The Belgian foremen would bring baskets full of brown hands back to the boss, piled up like a mess of fish. Could this be true of civilized white Christians?”

— Barbara Kingsolver

498. “I put my face to the window so nobody would see, if I tore up. Was this me now, for life? Taking up space where people wished I wasn’t? Once on a time I was something, and then I turned, like sour milk. The dead junkie’s kid. A rotten little piece of American pie that everybody wishes could just be, you know. Removed.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

499. “It was hard to see where all this could possibly go when it melted.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

500. “I keep hoping some guy with ‘Ron’ or ‘Andy’ stitched on his pocket and a gas pump in his hand will step up and tell me where I’m headed.”

— Barbara Kingsolver