Top 500 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “She kept swimming out into life because she hadn’t yet found a rock to stand on.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

52. “I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

53. “We’re animals. We’re born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

54. “Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you’ll behave to other people.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

55. “I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

56. “Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

57. “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

58. “If it’s important, your heart remembers.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

59. “How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

60. “To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct – crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!”

— Barbara Kingsolver

61. “Science doesn’t tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

62. “Morning always comes.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

63. “It’s one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

64. “Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It’s everyone’s, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

66. “After ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

67. “The happiest people are the ones with the most community.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

68. “Many of us who aren’t farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

69. “The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

70. “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

71. “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

72. “Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

73. “The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

74. “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

75. “All of the promises of politicians, generals, madmen, and crusaders that war can create peace have yet to be borne out.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

76. “The thing is, it’s my own fault. I just can’t put up with a person that won’t go out of his way for me. And that’s what a man is. Somebody that won’t go out of his way for you. I bet it says that in the dictionary.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

77. “There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it’s true, but you haven’t told anyone yet.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

78. “Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It’s more like conversation, raising new questions and moving you to answer them for yourself.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

79. “Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

80. “Wherever I am, let me never forget to distinguish want from need.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

81. “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

82. “There but for the grace of serotonin go the rest of us.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

83. “Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job... And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another – that is surely the basic instinct... Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

84. “As a biologist, I can’t think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

85. “The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

86. “I have my own sheep and I literally sheer the sheep and knot sweaters for friends and family from scratch.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

87. “Love weighs nothing.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

88. “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

89. “It’s as if cats live in a separate universe that takes up the same space as ours, but is full of fascinating things like mice or sparrows or special TV programs that we can’t see.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

90. “A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

91. “Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, it adds up.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

92. “It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you’ll be labeled a political writer.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

93. “I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

94. “Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

95. “Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

96. “Lies are infinite in number, and the truth so small and singular.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

97. “The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

98. “It’s terrible to lose somebody, but it’s also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that’s got to be so much worse.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

99. “Do you know, I spent the first half of my life avoiding motherhood and tires, and now I’m counting them as blessings?”

— Barbara Kingsolver

100. “God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.”

— Barbara Kingsolver