Top 500 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Plot comes first. The plot is the archictecture of your novel. You wouldn’t build a house without a plan. If I wrote without a plot, it would just be a pile of bricks. Characters are your servants. They must serve your plot.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

103. “I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

104. “Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

105. “Peace and Love, get high and fly with the dove.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

106. “I thought I’d had a pretty hard life. But I keep finding out that life can be hard in ways I never knew about.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

107. “After a while Estevan said, “What I really hate is not belonging in any place. To be unwanted everywhere.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

108. “Our journey was to be a great enterprise of balance. My father, of course, was bringing the Word of God – which fortunately weighs nothing at all.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

109. “Cars with flames painted on the hood might get more speeding tickets. Are the flames making the car go fast? No. Certain things just go together. And when they do, they are correlated. It is the darling of all human errors to assume, without proper testing, that one is the cause of the other.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

110. “It’s surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

111. “They say you thatched your roof and now you must not run out of your house if it rains.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

112. “SUNRISE TANTALIZE, evil eyes hypnotize:.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

113. “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.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

114. “I felt the breath of God go cold against my skin.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

115. “It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

116. “I’d forgotten how trees full of bird sounds made you sense the world differently: that life didn’t just stop at eye level.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

118. “What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

119. “Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

120. “My father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God’s footsoldiers while our mother’s is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

121. “Two dots an inch apart, as small and tidy as punctuation marks at the end of a sentence none of us could read. The sentence would have started somewhere just above her heart.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

122. “This Forest eats itself and lives forever.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

123. “Sugar, it’s no parade but you’ll get down the street one way or another, so you’d just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

124. “Our childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

125. “People’s dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It’s what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

126. “High fashion has the shelf life of potato salad. And when past its prime, it is similarly deadly.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

127. “Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

128. “The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

129. “I never could figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a big dangerous deal. I mean, we’ve got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don’t we?”

— Barbara Kingsolver

130. “He lifts her breasts, which fit perfectly into his hands, though he knows this is no promise that he gets to keep them. A million things you can’t have will fit in a human hand.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

131. “But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

132. “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 everyday...”

— Barbara Kingsolver

133. “It’s terrible to lose somebody,” I said, “I mean, I don’t know firsthand, but I can imagine it must be. 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

134. “Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

135. “The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things, it can kill.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

136. “For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

137. “Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

138. “Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

139. “Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

140. “Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

141. “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their skulls and onto paper.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

142. “Honk if you love Jesus, text while driving if you want to meet up.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

143. “The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. What I want is almost so simple I can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

144. “Maybe he’s been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

145. “That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don’t know how a person could ever describe that scent.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

146. “You can curse the dead or pray for them, but don’t expect them to do a thing for you. They’re far too interested in watching us, to see what in heaven’s name we will do next.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

147. “The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

148. “I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint, stirring breeze. The scent trail shifts, causing the predator to miss the pounce. One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

149. “Small change, small wonders – these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

150. “There’s such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it’s like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.”

— Barbara Kingsolver