Top 500 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “In my opinion, mountains don’t move. They only look changed when you look down on them from a greaty height.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

305. “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

306. “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

307. “You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

308. “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

309. “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

310. “Never be mean in anything. Never be false. Never be cruel. I can always be hopeful of you.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

311. “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

312. “It’s the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

313. “His scent burst onto her brain like a rain of lights, causing her to know him perfectly. This is how moths speak to each other. The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

314. “Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man’s skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people’s back yards.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

315. “She made it plain that her fondest wish was to have a grandbaby. Whenever fat Irene would pick up the baby, which was not too often, Mrs. Hoge would declare, “Irene, you don’t know how becoming that looks.” As if someone ought to have a kid because it looked good on them.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

316. “It only we could recover faith in a seed – and in all the other complicated marvels that can’t fit in a sound bite. Then we humans might truly know the glory of knowing our place.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

317. “Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

318. “You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what’s broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it’s broken, you are automatically disqualified.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

319. “Scientific illiteracy in our populations is leaving too many of us unprepared to discuss or understand much of the damage we are wreaking on our atmosphere, our habitat, and even the food that enters our mouths.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

320. “Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

321. “Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

322. “I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction – they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

323. “Corn syrup and added fats have been outed as major ingredients in fast food, but they hide out in packaged foods too, even presumed-innocent ones like crackers.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

324. “Root out all the “to be” verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No “It was” or “they are” or “I am.” Don’t let it be, make it happen.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

325. “Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

326. “If you ask me, when something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

327. “It’s a fact of our culture that the loudest mouths get the most airplay, and the loudmouths are saying that in times of crisis it’s treasonous to question our leaders.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

328. “I don’t know,” Magda says, “Seems like that’s just how it is with you and me. We’re like islands on the moon.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

329. “I’ve never gotten over high school, to the extent that I’m still a little surprised that my friends want to hang out with me.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

330. “They all attended Hester’s church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

331. “Now, see, that’s why everybody wants Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy.′ Dovey’s phone buzzed, and she laughed, ignoring it. ‘The trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn’t agree with you, all that’s left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

332. “For God’s sake, man,” Ovid nearly shouted, “the damn globe is catching fire, and the islands are drowning. The evidence is staring them in the face.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

333. “The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment’s pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

334. “Sometimes I still have American dreams. I mean literally. I see microwave ovens and exercise machines and grocery store shelves with 30 brands of shampoo, and I look at these things oddly, in my dream. I stand and think, “What is all this for? What is the hunger that drives this need?” I think it’s fear. Codi, I hope you won’t be hurt by this, but I don’t think I’ll ever be going back. I don’t think I can.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

335. “Cooking is the great divide between good eating and bad. The gains are quantifiable. Cooking and eating at home – even with quality ingredients – costs pennies on the dollar compared with meals prepared by a restaurant or factory.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

336. “Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down.” – Mrs. Brown.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

337. “Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

338. “You can fool history sometimes, but you can’t fool the memory of your intimates.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

339. “The important thing isn’t the house. It’s the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

340. “The reason most people have kids is because they get pregnant.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

341. “Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

342. “If people really gave it full consideration, I mean, like if you could return a baby after thirty days’ examination like one of those Time-Life books, then I figure the entire human species would go extinct in a month’s time.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

343. “This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it ‘to the editor who can appreciate my work’ and it has simply come back stamped ‘Not at this address’. Just keep looking for the right address.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

344. “And all of us with our closed eyes smelled the frangipani blossoms in the big rectangles of open wall, flowers so sweet they conjure up sin or heaven, depending on which way you are headed.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

345. “Most people lived so far from it, they thought you could just choose, carnivore or vegetarian, without knowing that the chemicals on grain and cotton killed far more butterflies and bees and bluebirds and whippoorwills than the mortal cost of a steak or a leather jacket.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

346. “Being a peacock is not the only way to hide yourself, Frida. A pigeon can hide. – Lacuna.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

347. “My way of finding a place in this world is to write one.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

348. “In the places that call me out, I know I’ll recover my wordless childhood trust in the largeness of life and its willingness to take me in.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

349. “Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don’t; but we wear it all the same.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

350. “The talkers are rising above the thinkers.”

— Barbara Kingsolver