Top 500 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

206. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

218. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

221. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

223. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for!”

— Barbara Kingsolver

229. “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

230. “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

231. “Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

232. “Hallie and I... were all there was. The image in the mirror that proves you are still here. We had exactly one sister apiece. We grew up knowing the simple arithmetic of scarcity: A sister is more precious than an eye.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

233. “You learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist history rather than a spectator” Father Fernando Cardenal.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

234. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

238. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

241. “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

242. “A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

243. “But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

244. “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

245. “Where you’d be wearing out the knees of your trousers, sir, they just have to go ahead and wear out their knees!”

— Barbara Kingsolver

246. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

248. “Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you’re contagious.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

249. “There are days when I am envious of my hens: when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver