Top 500 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “An animal is the sum of its behaviors, its community dynamics. Not just the physical body.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

302. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

314. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

322. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

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. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

331. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

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. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

342. “I was struck with how full a silence could be: a Carolina wren sang from the eave of the shed; cedar waxwings carried on whispery bickerings up in the cherry; a mockingbird did an odd jerky dance, as if seized by the bird spirit, out on the driveway. The pea bowl rang like an insistent bell as we tossed in our peas.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

343. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

345. “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

346. “It’s the worst of bad manners to ridicule the small gesture... Small, stepwise changes in personal habits aren’t trivial. Ultimately they will, or won’t, add up to having been the thing that mattered.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

347. “The first to fall in any war are forgotten. No love gets lost over one person’s reckless mistake. Only after it’s a mountain of bodies bagged do we think to raise a flag and call the mistake by a different name, because one downfall times a thousand has got to mean something. It needs its own brand, some point to all the sacrifice.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver