Top 500 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

154. “Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

155. “When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

156. “I shrugged. “I saw a Star Trek episode one time that was along those lines. All the women on this whole planet end up naked. I can’t remember exactly, but I think Captain Kirk gets turned into a pipe wrench.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

157. “At some point in my life I’d honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I’d quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

158. “A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

159. “There is not justice in this world. Father, forgive me wherever you are, but this world has brought one vile abomination after another down on the heads of the gentle, and I’ll not live to see the meek inherit anything.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

160. “From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

161. “When you’re given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

162. “I look at my four boys, who are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

163. “Growing food was the first activity that gave us enough prosperity to stay in one place, form complex social groups, tell our stories, and build our cities.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

164. “I have seen women looking at jewelry ads with a misty eye and one hand resting on the heart, and I only know what they’re feeling because that’s how I read the seed catalogs in January.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

165. “I live in southern Appalachia, so I’m surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It’s particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren’t living nearly as well.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

166. “A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

167. “Really it was her mother she’d wanted to call right after the bad news, or in the middle of it, while Mr. Petrofaccio was blowing his nose. First thing in the morning, last thing at night, whenever a fight with Tig left her in pieces, it had been her mother who put Willa back together. When someone mattered like that, you didn’t lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

168. “He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

169. “Let me claim that Africa and I kept company for a while and then parted ways as if we were both party to relations with a failed outcome. Or say I was afflicted with Africa like a bout of a rare disease from which I have not managed a full recovery.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

170. “I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

171. “You lie down with snakes, you get up with the urge to bite back. All I’m saying.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

172. “Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

173. “Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they are missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

174. “I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don’t move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

175. “I could see that the whole idea and business of Childhood was nothing guaranteed. It seemed to me, in fact, like something more or less invented by white people and stuck onto the front end of grown-up life like a frill on a dress.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

176. “To live is to be marked, to live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

177. “It’s the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

178. “Write a nonfiction book, and be prepared for the legion of readers who are going to doubt your fact. But write a novel, and get ready for the world to assume every word is true.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

179. “A woman without a man – a condition of ‘manlessness’ – is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

180. “This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

181. “It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

182. “The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

183. “When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

184. “A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

185. “People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

186. “I realized that I had come to my own terms with the desert, but my soul was thirsty.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

187. “Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

188. “Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn’t.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

189. “When someone mattered like that, you didn’t lose her at death. You lost her as you kept living.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

190. “Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

191. “Concentrating on local foods means thinking of fruit invariably as the product of an orchard, and winter squash as the fruit of an early-winter farm. It’s a strategy that will keep grocery money in the neighborhood, where it gets recycled into your own school system and local businesses. The green spaces surrounding your town stay green, and farmers who live nearby get to grow more food next year, for you.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

192. “Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

193. “My morning begins with trying not to get up before the sun rises. But when I do, it’s because my head is too full of words, and I just need to get to my desk and start dumping them into a file. I always wake with sentences pouring into my head.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

194. “The sting of a fly, the Congolese say, can launch the end of the world. How simply things begin.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

195. “I’m not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I’m doing.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

196. “I do understand that they fall when I’m least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

197. “Conquest and liberation and democracy and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

198. “But I’ll tell you a secret. 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 every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

199. “What I’m saying is nobody feels sorry for anybody anymore, nobody even pretends they do. Not even the President. It’s like it’s become unpatriotic.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

200. “A woman knows she can walk away from a pot to tend something else and the pot will go on boiling; if she couldn’t this world would end at once.”

— Barbara Kingsolver