All Quotes by Barbara Kingsolver
“Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.”
“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.”
“Time cures you first, and then it kills you.”
“Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.”
“People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.”
“Sugar, 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.”
“Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different though. You could say the view is larger.”
“Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing blow with his sky-blue mouth as he passed.”
“Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity *after* their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it's the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand.”
“A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.”
“Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.”
“The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.”
“At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.”
“He was wounded. I suppose some sharp thing in me wanted to sting him, for making me need him now. After he'd once cut me to the edge of what a soul will bear. But that was senseless.... I looked at this grown-up Loyd and tried to make sense of him, seeing clearly that he was too sweet to survive around me. I would go to my grave expecting the weapon in the empty hand.”
“Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.”
“Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.”
“It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.”
“A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever.”
“We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.”
“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”
“A flock is nothing but the put-together of all your past choices.”
“Even the most recalcitrant climate scientists agree now, the place is heating up. pretty much every one of the lot. Unless some other outcome is written on the subject line of his paycheck. [...] If you were here to get information, Tina, you would not be standing in my laboratory telling me what scientists think.”
“Cub retreated to the familiar grounds of remorse and insufficiency, the terms of his existence, ratified by marriage. He could construct defeat from any available material and live inside it, but for once Dellarobia didn't go there with him. she was going ahead.”
“There is some kind of juice in our brains that makes us only care about what's in front of us right this minute. Even if we know something different will happen later and we should think about that too. [...] If I could teach you one thing, Preston, that's it. Think about what's coming at you later on.”
“I also thank Bill McKibben and his 350.org colleagues for the most important work in the world, and the most unending.”
“A territory is only possessed for a moment in time.”
“There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.”
“Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.”
“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.”