Top 500 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “At the time, I thought my life couldn’t get any worse. Here’s some advice: Don’t ever think that.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

308. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

331. “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

332. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

341. “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

342. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

348. “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

349. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver