Top 500 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “It’s the one thing we never quite get over: that we contain our own future.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

302. “Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job... And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another – that is surely the basic instinct... Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you’ll be labeled a political writer.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

318. “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

319. “No kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

320. “Several studies, including research done by Allison Byrum of the American Chemical Society, have shown fruits and vegetables grown without pesticides and herbicides to contain 50 to 60 percent more antioxidants than their sprayed counterparts.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

322. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

334. “That is surely childhood’s end, when you look at a thing like a rabbit needing skinned and have to say: “Nobody else is going to do this.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

335. “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

336. “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

337. “Oh, man, don’t get me started on the subject of childhood brainwash. I hate that. Every fairy story, every Disney movie, every plot with animals in it, the bad guy is always the top carnivore. Wolf, grizzly, anaconda, Tyrannosaurus rex.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

338. “This will be Great Mam’s last spring. Her last June apples. Her last fresh roasting ears from the garden.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

339. “The girl was compulsively honest. In earlier years, Willa’s every attempt to teach her the artful evasion known as “tact” would get shot down with “Mom, that’s lying!” And Tig remained the child who announced when opening gifts at birthday parties, “Thanks, Grandma, I have one of these already and I don’t really like it.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

340. “Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

342. “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

343. “Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one, “My life; what I stole from history, and how I live with it.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

344. “Sal Monelli was an unfortunate fellow whose name had struck such terror in her heart she forbade him to touch any food item that wasn’t sealed and crated. Lou Ann’s life was ruled by the fear of salmonella, to the extent that she claimed the only safe way to eat potato salad was to stick your head in the refrigerator and eat it in there.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

346. “Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel – that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

347. “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

348. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

350. “It occurs to her that there is one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.”

— Barbara Kingsolver