Top 500 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

258. “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

259. “When people run for their lives they frequently neglect to bring along their file cabinets of evidence,” she said. Mattie wasn’t often bitter but when she was, she was. I didn’t want to believe the world could be so unjust. But of course it was right there in front of my nose.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

260. “If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

261. “It’s also interesting how it’s hard to be depressed around a three-year-old, if you’re paying attention. After a while, whatever you’re mooning about begins to seem like some elaborate adult invention.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

262. “It’s a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

263. “You can’t just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over to the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

264. “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

265. “If you never stepped on anybody’s toes, you never been for a walk.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

266. “Now I’m starting to think he wasn’t supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

267. “In Congo, a slashed jungle quickly becomes a field of flowers, and scars become the ornaments of a particular face. Call it oppression, complicity, stupefaction, call it what you like, it doesn’t matter. Africa swallowed the conqueror’s music and sang a new song of her own.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

268. “There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

269. “You know what really gets me?” I asked him. “How people call you ‘illegals.’ That just pisses me off, I don’t know how you can stand it. A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal?”

— Barbara Kingsolver

270. “The last generation’s worst fears became the next one’s B-grade entertainment.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

271. “Spring is made of solid, fourteen-karat gratitude, the reward for the long wait. Every religious tradition from the northern hemisphere honors some form of April hallelujah, for this is the season of exquisite redemption, a slam-bang return to joy after a season of cold second thoughts.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

272. “Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn’t rip off.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

273. “So Noah cursed all Ham’s children to be slaves forever and ever. That’s how come them to turn out dark.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

274. “Ah, the mysterious croak. Here today, gone tomorrow. It’s the best reason I can think of to throw open the blinds and risk belief. Right now, this minute, time to move out into the grief and glory. High tide.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

275. “He crossed his arms over the chair back and smirked his disapproval at Brother Fowles. “Sir, I offer you my condolences. Personally I’ve never been troubled by any such difficulties with interpreting God’s word.” “Indeed, I see that,” Brother Fowles said.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

276. “For scientists, reality is not optional.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

277. “Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

278. “If the Lord hasn’t got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that’s his business.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

279. “Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It’s the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

280. “But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

281. “The things I carry closest to my heart are things I can’t own.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

282. “This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

283. “I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it “intently political.” I’m just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

284. “I’ve about decided that’s the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you’re a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

285. “Terms like that, ‘Humane Society,’ are devised with people like me in mind, who don’t care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

286. “I prefer to remain anomalous.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

287. “Mother could go for one year without food, but not one day without her lip sticks.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

288. “An animal is the sum of its behaviors, its community dynamics. Not just the physical body.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

289. “Moths must fly to his flame and perish gladly.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

290. “The women of his family would become one with the earth’s creatures only by pressing the bones of whales against their rib cages until breathless.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

291. “Once the rains abated, my father’s garden thrived in the heat like an unleashed temper.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

292. “Do you think its possible to live without wanting to put your name on your paintings? To belong to a group so securely you don’t need to rise above it?”

— Barbara Kingsolver

293. “Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he’s entitled to joy rather than submission?”

— Barbara Kingsolver

294. “I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

295. “Anybody can get worked up, if they have the intention. It’s peacefulness that is hard to come by on purpose.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

296. “In my opinion, mountains don’t move. They only look changed when you look down on them from a greaty height.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

297. “A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world’s best juices for ourselves-these may also be our enemies. The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

298. “You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don’t attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

299. “If you can’t dress expensive, dress memorable.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

300. “The Middle East and North Africa are almost out of water. Asia’s underwater. Syria is dystopian, Somalia, Bangladesh, dystopian. Everybody’s getting weather that never happened before. Melting permafrost means we’ve got like, a minute to turn this mess around, or else it’s going to stop us.”

— Barbara Kingsolver