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Barbara Kingsolver Quotes - Page 17

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Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.

Fiction is a sort of inter-human magic, allowing you to travel into a scene and feel it tingle on your skin.

Barbara Kingsolver
Magic, Skins, Fiction

But we've all ended up giving body and soul to Africa, one way or another. Even Adah, who's becoming an expert in tropical epidemiology and strange new viruses. Each of us got our heart buried in six feet of African dirt; we are all co-conspirators here. I mean, all of us, not just my family. So what do you do now? You get to find your own way to dig out a heart and shake it off and hold it up to the light again.

Barbara Kingsolver
Heart, Mean, Light

A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.

Barbara Kingsolver
Hands, Wife, Earth
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.79, Faber & Faber

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

Barbara Kingsolver
Children, Seven, Minutes
"Animal Dreams". Book by Barbara Kingsolver, 1990.

The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.

Barbara Kingsolver
Progress, Matter, March
"Animal Dreams". Book by Barbara Kingsolver, 1990.

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.

Barbara Kingsolver
Book, Jumping, Magic

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.

Barbara Kingsolver
Beautiful, Religious, Land
Barbara Kingsolver (2011). “Small Wonder”, p.48, Faber & Faber

What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?

Barbara Kingsolver
Running, And Love, Woods

A flower is your cousin...Sometimes a person has got to take a life, like a chicken's or a hog's when you need it...But nobody is so hungry they need to kill a flower. Cherokee great-grandmother

Barbara Kingsolver
Cousin, Flower, Grandmother

But I've swallowed my pride before, that's for sure. I'm practically lined with my mistakes on the inside like a bad-wallpapered bathroom.

Barbara Kingsolver
Mistake, Pride, Bathroom
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.382, Faber & Faber

Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them.

Barbara Kingsolver
Revenge, Numbers, Doe
Barbara Kingsolver (2011). “Small Wonder”, p.233, Faber & Faber

I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience.

Barbara Kingsolver
White, People, Snow
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.13, Faber & Faber

The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.

Barbara Kingsolver
Choices, Survival, Promise

restraint equals indulgence

Barbara Kingsolver
Restraint, Indulgence
Barbara Kingsolver (2010). “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Our Year of Seasonal Eating”, p.32, Faber & Faber

But still, I’d be darned if I was going to be one of those Americans who stomp around Italy barking commands in ever-louder English. I was going to be one of those Americans who traversed Italy with my forehead knit in concentration, divining wordsw from their Latin roots and answering by wedging French cognates into Italian pronunciations spliced onto a standard Spanish verb conjugation.

Barbara Kingsolver
Latin, Animal, Italian

...trust in Creation which is made fresh daily and doesn’t suffer in translation. This God does not work in especially mysterious ways. The sun here rises and sets at six exactly. A caterpillar becomes a butterfly. A bird raises its brood in the forest and a greenheart tree will only grow from a greenheart seed. He brings drought sometimes followed by torrential rains and if these things aren’t always what I had in mind, they aren’t my punishment either. They’re rewards, let’s say for the patience of a seed.

Barbara Kingsolver
Rain, Butterfly, Punishment

Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise.

Barbara Kingsolver
Running, Color, Water
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “Prodigal Summer”, p.43, Faber & Faber

my own relationships with the animals in my life are absurdly complex: Some I love, some I eat, and the scraps left over from the ones I eat, I feed to the ones I love.

Barbara Kingsolver
Animal, Eating, Complexes
Barbara Kingsolver (2011). “Small Wonder”, p.84, Faber & Faber

Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.

Barbara Kingsolver
Christian, Long, Forgotten
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.304, Faber & Faber

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.

Barbara Kingsolver
Tree, Forever, Forests
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.443, Faber & Faber

We came from Bethlehem, Georgia bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle.

Barbara Kingsolver
Cake, Georgia, Bethlehem
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.16, Faber & Faber

She is inhumanly alone. And then, all at once, she isn't.

Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.11, Faber & Faber

Back then I was still appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting fo the dollies.

Barbara Kingsolver
Girl, Boys, Eden
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.393, Faber & Faber

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
Running, Eye, Black And White
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “Prodigal Summer”, p.140, Faber & Faber

Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind.

Barbara Kingsolver
Wind, Sky, One Day

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