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

352. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

354. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

379. “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

380. “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

381. “I don’t look like who I am.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

387. “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

388. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

394. “Everything truly important is washable.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

396. “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

397. “There can be no greater spiritual accomplishment than to come through brutal trials and then look back and see that mean times did not render us mean spirits.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

398. “We cater to the better class of gentile clientele. We reserve the right to decline service to anyone we deem to be incompatible.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

399. “Every time I step onto an airplane, I turn to the right and take a good, hard stare into the maw of the engine. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I just do it.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

400. “She told him television was a bad influence. Probably she was right. Like those white birds he’s been seeing outside the window, it flashes its wings and promises whatever you want, even before you knew you wanted it.”

— Barbara Kingsolver