Top 500 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

354. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “The past is all we know of the future.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

361. “Downstream is always someone else’s up.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

362. “You and I are not like other people. We perceive infinite nature as a fascination, not a threat to our sovereignty... When the nuisance of old mythologies falls away from us, we may see with new eyes.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

363. “He doesn’t even look at her because there is too much there, and he’s afraid. She is his first child, his favorite, every mistake he ever made.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

364. “Some of us know how we came by our fortune, and some of us don’t, but we wear it all the same. There’s only one question worth asking now: How do we aim to live with it?”

— Barbara Kingsolver

365. “Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

366. “When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

367. “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

368. “I didn’t wish to be comforted. “You can’t replace people you love with other people,” I said. “They’re not like old shoes or something.” “No. But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

369. “One percent of the brotherhood has their hands on most of the bread. They own the country, their god is the free market, and most people are so unhorrified they won’t even question the system. If it makes a profit, that’s the definition of good. If it grows, you have to stand back and let it. The free market has exactly the same morality as a cancer cell.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

370. “Arterial-plaque specials that save minutes now can cost years, later on.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

371. “Holding and synthesizing information in your brain creates your personality. You’re surrendering your personality to an electronic device in your pocket.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

372. “It’s tough to break yourself as news to a town that already knows you.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

373. “If trained to nature from an early age, could a mind be freed from its vendetta against the world’s creatures?”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

375. “Nine-tenths of human law is about possession.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

376. “Plus,” Tig said, “it reminds me to be patient. Seeing all these people that have passed on. I get frustrated sometimes, waiting.” “For people to die?” “Yeah. To be honest. The guys in charge of everything right now are so old. They really are, Mom. Older than you. They figured out the meaning of life in, I guess, the nineteen fifties and sixties. When it looked like there would always be plenty of everything.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

377. “I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

378. “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

379. “It is completely usual for me to get up in the morning, take a look around, and laugh out loud.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

380. “Everything truly important is washable.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

381. “I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

382. “It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

383. “Pay attention to your passions. They are the key to starting and finishing the book you are meant to write. I don’t believe in talent. I believe in passion.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

384. “It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant’s afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it’s been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

385. “We tap our toes to chaste love songs about the silvery moon without recognizing them as hymns to copulation.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

386. “You from out of town?” he asked after a while, eying my car. “No,” I said. “I go to Kentucky every year to get my license plate.” I didn’t like his looks.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

387. “I believe that the people who survive a cataclysm, rather than those who stand by and analyze it, are nearly always the more credible witnesses to their own history.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

388. “I don’t look like who I am.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

389. “In Kilanga, people knew nothing of things they might have had – a Frigidaire? a washer-dryer combination? Really, they’d sooner imagine a tree that could pull up its feet and go bake bread. It didn’t occur to them to feel sorry for themselves.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

390. “One way of surviving heartache is to stay busy. Making something right in at least one tiny corner of the vast house of wrongs...”

— Barbara Kingsolver

391. “The daily work – that goes on, it adds up.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

392. “We agreed with him in principal – we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

393. “The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

394. “He asked me if the alligator was a national symbol of the United States, because you saw them everywhere on people’s shirts, just above the heart.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

395. “What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

396. “It’s a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can’t begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

397. “I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

398. “So much energy squandered in the unwinnable war waged by woman against the life-form she is.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

399. “Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

400. “The older I get, the more I appreciate my rural childhood. I spent a lot of time outdoors, unsupervised, which is a blessing.”

— Barbara Kingsolver