Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.

Mom is losing, no doubt, because our vegetables have come to lack two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. Storage and transport take predictable tolls on the volatile plant compounds that subtly add up to taste and food value. Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to decrease palatability. Bizarre as it seems, we've accepted a tradeoff that amounts to: "Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of its former self."

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

A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture.

Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.

Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.

A sound-bite culture can't discuss science very well. Exactly what we're losing when we reduce biodiversity, the causes and consequences of global warming-these traumas can't be adequately summarized in an evening news wrap-up.

There's always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.

It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

Once the rains abated, my father's garden thrived in the heat like an unleashed temper.

A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.

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

Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.

Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

The thing is, it's my own fault. I just can't put up with a person that won't go out of his way for me. And that's what a man is. Somebody that won't go out of his way for you. I bet it says that in the dictionary.

It's terrible to lose somebody, but it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse.

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

Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.

Global commerce is driven by a single conviction: the inalienable right to earn profit, regardless of any human cost.

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.

Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you're contagious.

You could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they're not self-sufficient.

The things I carry closest to my heart are things I can't own.

(on asparagus) Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac, and the church banned it from nunneries.

I can think of no honorable answer. Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste, while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining? There is nothing about the United States I can really explain to this child of another world.

I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.

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.

From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.

Wake up now, look alive, for here is a day off work just to praise Creation: the turkey, the squash, and the corn, these things that ate and drank sunshine, grass, mud, and rain, and then in the shortening days laid down their lives for our welfare and onward resolve. There's the miracle for you, the absolute sacrifice that still holds back seed: a germ of promise to do the whole thing again, another time. . . Thanksgiving is Creation's birthday party. Praise harvest, a pause and sigh on the breath of immortality.

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.

restraint equals indulgence

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.

Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation.

Parenting is something that happens mostly while you're thinking of something else.

A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.

You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.

A woman without a man -- a condition of 'manlessness' -- is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife.

School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.

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

Like Daniel she enteres the lions' den, but lacking Daniel's pure and unblemished soul, Ada is spiced with the flavors of vice that make for a tasty meal. Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.

Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.

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.

I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.

Households that have lost the soul of cooking from their routines may not know what they are missing: the song of a stir-fry sizzle, the small talk of clinking measuring spoons, the yeasty scent of rising dough, the painting of flavors onto a pizza before it slides into the oven.

You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.

Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn't it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.

In the long run, most of us spend about fifteen minutes total in the entanglements of passion, and the rest of our days looking back on it, humming the tune.