Top 500 Barbara Kingsolver Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

406. “The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman’s coal buttons. No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

407. “I knew exactly what I should have said: Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

408. “Without shelter, we stand in daylight.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

409. “That’s how it is: some people are content to wait till you ask, while others jump right in with the whole story.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

410. “You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I’m midway through a book before it happens. However, I don’t wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I’m not delivering lambs on the farm.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

411. “This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he is not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

412. “I write every moment that is humanly possible. I write every day and every night. The only discipline I lack is the discipline is to quit.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

413. “A writer’s occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

414. “Even the vendors sitting on stools around the periphery work steadily at connection, nodding at potential buyers, like a sewing machine prodding its needle into the cloth.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

415. “There is something in us that loves certain disasters and the fever of this moment and surrendering to that.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

416. “I’m widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I’m not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

417. “No one seemed to realize calculating sums requires only the most basic machinery and good concentration. Poetry is far more difficult. And palindromes, with their perfect, satisfying taste: Draw a level award! Yet it is always the thin gray grocery sums that make an impression.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

418. “The rule of fishes is the same as the rule of people: if the shark comes, they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten. They share a single jumpy heart that drives them to move all together, running away from danger just before it arrives. Somehow they know. Underneath.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

419. “This is what it means to be very slow: every story you would like to tell has already ended before you can open your mouth.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

420. “The view from our garden is spectacular. I thought about people I knew who right at that moment might be plucking chickens, picking strawberries and lettuce, just for us. I felt grateful to the people involved, and the animals also. I don’t say this facetiously. I sent my thanks across the county, like any sensible person saying grace before a meal.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

421. “You know reviewers, they are the wind in their own sails.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

422. “Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can’t persist much longer. If it does, then we won’t.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

423. “Iano ordered her back to Ivins to finish her degree in biology. Willa wondered when he would notice Tig was immune to his directives. Tig informed her parents she refused to take out bank loans, with tuition exchange no longer an option, and anyway she’d already learned more than she wanted to know about a ravaged biosphere. The latter was no news to Willa, who’d seen how the girl always took the truth of human selfishness harder than any of her friends, even the history majors.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

424. “My heart had grown older, with more in it to break.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

425. “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

426. “The wounds of this ruptured nation lie open and ugly.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

427. “Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

428. “No reporter worth his buttons will let the facts intrude on a good story.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

429. “When people are frightened about going hungry and paying their mortgages, a scarcity model begins to prevail; they fear someone else will get their piece of the pie.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

430. “A mother’s unfulfilled ambitions lie heaviest on her daughters.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

431. “How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

432. “Nobody had planted these flowers, I felt sure, nor harvested them either; these were works that the Lord had gone ahead and finished on His own. He must have lacked faith in mankind’s follow-through capabilities, on the day he created flowers.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

433. “Come to think of it, just about every tool was shaped like either a weenie or a pistol, depending on your point of view.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

434. “The part of my soul that is driven to make stories is a fierce thing, like a ferret: long, sleek, incapable of sleep, it digs and bites through all I know of the world.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

435. “Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

436. “The best artifact was the calendar of the ancients, a great carved piece of stone as big as a kitchen, circular, bolted to the wall like a giant clock. In the center was an angry face looking out, as if he’d come through that stone from some other place to have a look at us, and not very pleased about it.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

437. “They rock against each other, holding on, and the birds in the forest raise their voices to drown out the secret of creation.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

438. “Our house is like an empty cigarette packet, lying around reminding you what’s not in it.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

439. “It was pretty clear there would be no stopping the Bullhorn, or someone like him. Here was the earthquake, the fire, flood, and melting permafrost, with everyone still grabbing for bricks to put in their pockets rather than walking out of the wreck and looking for light.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

440. “Time cures you first, and then it kills you.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

441. “Her name, he says like the Lord’s taken in vain. Sometimes he says “Mexico,” and the word has nothing in it at all. A wall with no colors painted on it.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

442. “She never wore a watch, and for this she didn’t need one.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

443. “First they would stagger, then grow competent, and then forget the difficulty altogether while thinking of other things, and that was survival.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

444. “Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

445. “We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

446. “I will never understand it,” she said. “We’re the top of our food chain, so you’d think we’d relate to those guys the best. Seems like we’d be trying to talk them into trade agreements.” Eddie laughed at that. “So you’re telling me that as a kid, you were rooting for the wolf to eat the Riding Hood babe?” “My last name was Wolfe. I took it all kind of personally.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

447. “Today at the Melchor market, a fantastical sight. A servant girl with a birdcage on her back, full of birds. She wore her blue shawl wrapped around the cage and tied in front to hold it. The willow cage must have been very light because she was not bent over, yet it towered over her head, with turrets like a Japanese pagoda. And full of birds: green and yellow, flapping about like dreams trying to escape from a skull.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

448. “It is in his absence I prosper.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

449. “I don’t know where to start, Lou Ann,” I told her. “There’s just so damn much ugliness. Everywhere you look, some big guy kicking some little person when they’re down – look what they do to those people at Mattie’s. To hell with them, people say, let them die, it was their fault in the first place for being poor or in trouble, or for not being white, or whatever, how dare they try to come to this country.”

— Barbara Kingsolver

450. “A life was a life. She’d been orphaned at an age to internalize death as poor material for a joke. And likewise, salvation.”

— Barbara Kingsolver