When I look out the window, I exhale a prayer of thanks for the color green, for my children's safety, for the simple acts of faith like planting a garden that helped see us through another spring, another summer. And I inhale some kind of promise to protect my kids' hopes and good intentions we began with in this country. Freedom of speech, the protection of diversity - these are the most important ingredients of American civil life and my own survival. If I ever took them for granted, I don't know.
Barbara KingsolverMy father wears his faith like the bronze breastplate of God's footsoldiers while our mother's is more like a good cloth coat with a secondhand fit.
Barbara KingsolverHow 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 KingsolverMy life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction someone points me.
Barbara KingsolverIt is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
Barbara KingsolverSugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.
Barbara KingsolverI'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 KingsolverThe most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.
Barbara KingsolverI could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which... is at home at the moment.
Barbara KingsolverMr. 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 KingsolverThat was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don’t know how a person could ever describe that scent.
Barbara KingsolverSome of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don't; but we wear it all the same
Barbara KingsolverCooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.
Barbara KingsolverGod, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.
Barbara KingsolverIn exchange for his first taste of powdered milk, Pascal showed me a tree we could climb to find a bird's nest. After we handled and examined the pink-skinned baby birds, he popped one of them into his mouth like a jujube. It seemed to please him a lot. He offered a baby bird to me, pantomiming that I should eat it. I understood perfectly well what he meant, but I refused. He did not seem disappointed to have to eat the whole brood himself.
Barbara KingsolverPoetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.
Barbara KingsolverI attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.
Barbara KingsolverIt is completely usual for me to get up in the morning, take a look around, and laugh out loud.
Barbara KingsolverA careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world's best juices for ourselves-these may also be our enemies. The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
Barbara KingsolverYou don't think you'll live past it and you don't really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that's still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.
Barbara KingsolverTomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence.
Barbara KingsolverOur childhood had passed over into history overnight. The transition was unnoticed by anyone but ourselves.
Barbara KingsolverEmpathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.
Barbara KingsolverThere's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.
Barbara KingsolverIf my setting is new to a reader, or the concerns of the novel are new, I hope they will learn something about the world. I would like to say that they can trust that what they do learn in the novel will be accurate, because I pay a lot of attention to facts. I do a lot of research to make sure that I'm not giving them, you know, blue moons of Jupiter. It's not science fiction.
Barbara Kingsolver...nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.
Barbara KingsolverPerhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage.
Barbara KingsolverI'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 KingsolverBut nothing on this earth is guaranteed, when you get right down to it, you know ? I've been thinking about that. About how your kids aren't really YOURS, they're just these people that you try to keep an eye on, and hope you'll all grow up someday to like each other and still be in one piece. What I mean is, everything you get is really just on loan. Does that make sense?" Sure,"I said. "Like library books. Sooner or later they've all got to go back into the nightdrop.
Barbara KingsolverIt's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life.
Barbara KingsolverYou think you're the foreigner here, and I'm the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that . . . to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I'm a foreigner, too.
Barbara KingsolverLiterature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It's more like conversation, raising new questions and inspiring you to answer them for yourself.
Barbara KingsolverWhat we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.
Barbara KingsolverThanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.
Barbara KingsolverWhat keeps me awake at the wheel is the thrill of trying something completely new with each book. I’m not a risk-taker in life, generally speaking, but as a writer I definitely choose the fast car, the impossible rock face, the free fall.
Barbara KingsolverPlants do everything animals do, but slowly. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love. It's just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography.
Barbara KingsolverAs a biologist, I can't think of myself as anything but an animal among animals and plant.
Barbara KingsolverI don't bring expectations to any of my books. I don't tell people what to do. I want to invite them in.
Barbara KingsolverA mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.
Barbara Kingsolver