Top 500 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

452. “They rock against each other, holding on, and the birds in the forest raise their voices to drown out the secret of creation.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

453. “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

454. “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

455. “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

456. “Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,′ he said. ‘We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

457. “I’m never going to tell the reader what to believe; I’m going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

458. “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

459. “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

460. “First they would stagger, then grow competent, and then forget the difficulty altogether while thinking of other things, and that was survival.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

461. “Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

462. “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

463. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

466. “People ask without wanting to know.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

467. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

473. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

476. “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

477. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

479. “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

480. “Her every possession was either unbreakable, or broken.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

481. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

483. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

485. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

488. “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

489. “I felt emptied-out and singing with echoes, unrecognizable to myself: that particular feeling like your own house on the day you move out.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

490. “Never be mean in anything. Never be false. Never be cruel. I can always be hopeful of you.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

491. “Questioning our government’s actions does not violate the principles of liberty, equality, and freedom of speech; it exercises them, and by exercise we grow stronger. I have read enough of Thomas Jefferson to feel sure.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

492. “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

493. “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

494. “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

495. “To think is not always to see.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

497. “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

498. “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

499. “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

500. “When men want to kiss you they act like they are just on the brink of doing something that’s going to change the whole wide world.”

— Barbara Kingsolver