Top 500 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

202. “I walked through the valley of my fate, is all, and learned to love what I could lose.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

203. “If chained is where you have been, your ams will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You’ll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you’ll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

204. “A sound-bite culture can’t discuss science very well. Exactly what we’re losing when we reduce biodiversity, the causes and consequences of global warming-these traumas can’t be adequately summarized in an evening news wrap-up.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

205. “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

206. “But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after – oh, that’s love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she’s gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She’s the one you can’t put down.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

207. “Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

208. “To stand in the clear light of day, you once said. Unsheltered.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

209. “The traffic was moving about the speed of a government.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

210. “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

211. “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

212. “Oh, Rachel, Rachel,” Leah said. “Let me give you a teeny little lesson in political science. Democracy and dictatorship are political systems; they have to do with who participates in the leadership. Socialism and capitalism are economic systems. It has to do with who owns the wealth of the nations, and who gets to eat. Can you grasp that?”

— Barbara Kingsolver

213. “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

214. “You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one’s own.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

215. “She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn’t.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

216. “Quit smoking in the hope of growing old. It takes a long time to write. People go to books for wisdom and older authors tend to have more of it.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

217. “When they are pushed down long enough they will rise up. If they bite you, they are trying to fix things in the only way they know.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

218. “Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

219. “Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

220. “Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?”

— Barbara Kingsolver

221. “Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

222. “At its heart, a genuine food culture is an affinity between people and the land that feeds them. Step one, probably, is to live on the land that feeds them, or at least on the same continent, ideally the same region. Step two is to be able to countenance the ideas of “food” and “dirt” in the same sentence, and three is to start poking into one’s supply chain to learn where things are coming from.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

223. “What a rich wisdom it would be, and how much more bountiful a harvest, to gain pleasure not from achieving personal perfection but from understanding the inevitability of imperfection and pardoning those who also fall short of it.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

224. “Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

225. “The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

226. “Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

227. “No one. I’m a pawn in this game. You’re always first to say how unimportant I am. But at least I will be the pawn who tells the truth.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

228. “A storm was coming up from the south, moving slowly. It looked something like a huge blue-gray shower curtain being drawn along by the hand of God.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

229. “What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

230. “I know how people are with their habits of mind... as a husband quits a wife, leaving her with her naked body curled around the emptied-out mine of her womb. I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

231. “The first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see. Presumably the unselfish motives will follow as we wise up.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

232. “In the day-to-day, farm work is stress relief for me. At the end of the day, I love having this other career – my anti-job – that keeps me in shape and gives me control over a vegetal domain.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

233. “I rarely think of poetry as something I make happen; it is more accurate to say that it happens to me. Like a summer storm, a house afire, or the coincidence of both on the same day.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

234. “You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they’re not self-sufficient.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

235. “Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, and it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children’s bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don’t get lost.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

236. “You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

237. “Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

238. “The sloped desert plain that lay between us and the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

239. “Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behavior in children, and medicate it in adults? That’s so random. It’s like this whole shady setup.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

240. “My worst nightmare is being stuck somewhere with nothing to read.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

241. “Live long enough, and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

242. “When I was Turtle’s age I had never had anyone or anything important taken from me. I still hadn’t. Maybe I hadn’t started out with a whole lot, but pretty nearly all of it was still with me.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

243. “How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

244. “I know I’m a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary novelists engage with science.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

245. “God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

246. “What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won’t even stand close to the blade. I’m one of those. We don’t bend anything.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

247. “A flower is a plant’s way of making love.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

248. “A mother’s body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it’s own entreaties to body and soul.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

249. “Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they’re afraid to plant themselves?”

— Barbara Kingsolver

250. “If you’re standing in the manure pile, it’s somebody’s job to mention the stink.”

— Barbara Kingsolver