Top 500 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “But I’ve swallowed my pride before, that’s for sure. I’m practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— 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. “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

262. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

267. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

272. “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

273. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

276. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

278. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

282. “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

283. “Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

285. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

287. “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

288. “I prefer to remain anomalous.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

290. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

292. “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

293. “This household is like a pocketful of coins that jingled together for a time, but now have been slapped on a counter to pay a price. The pocket empties out, the coins venture back into the infinite circulation of currency, separate, invisible, and untraceable.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

295. “I don’t understand how any good art could fail to be political.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

296. “Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don’t respect his work?”

— Barbara Kingsolver

297. “Everything, she wanted to scream at him, was a question of safety. All human endeavor bent itself to the same lost cause. Being kept inside a pumpkin shell your whole life was no guarantee against getting flung into space.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

298. “I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

300. “What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.”

— Barbara Kingsolver