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Barbara Kingsolver Quotes about Children

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A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, so people

A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven't. Most don't mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn't happened, so people imagine a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had. But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she'll know.

Barbara Kingsolver
Love, Children, Miscarriage
"Animal Dreams". Book by Barbara Kingsolver, September 1990.

Children model the behavior of adults, on whatever scale is available to them. Ours are growing up in a nation whose most important, influential men - from presidents to the coolest film characters - solve problems by killing people. ... We have taught our children in a thousand ways, sometimes with flag-waving and sometimes with a laugh track, that the bad guy deserves to die.

Barbara Kingsolver
Children, Growing Up, Character

Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?

Barbara Kingsolver
Children, People, Adults

Most people no longer believe that buying sneakers made in Asian sweatshops is a kindness to those child laborers. Farming is similar. In every country on earth, the most human scenario for farmers is likely to be feeding those who live nearby-if international markets would allow them to do it. Food transport has become a bizarre and profitable economic equation that's no longer really about feeding anyone ... If you care about farmers, let the potatoes stay home.

Barbara Kingsolver
Country, Children, Kindness

With all due respect for the wondrous ways people have invented to amuse themselves and one another on paved surfaces, I find that this exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad. I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant's way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in.

Barbara Kingsolver
Nature, Children, Flower
Barbara Kingsolver (2011). “Small Wonder”, p.48, Faber & Faber

Our holiday food splurge was a small crate of tangerines, which we found ridiculously thrilling after an eight-month abstinence from citrus.... Lily hugged each one to her chest before undressing it as gently as a doll. Watching her do that as she sat cross-legged on the floor one morning in pink pajamas, with bliss lighting her cheeks, I thought: Lucky is the world, to receive this grateful child. Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

Barbara Kingsolver
Morning, Children, Food

A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name.

Barbara Kingsolver
Baby, Cheer, Children
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.320, Faber & Faber

I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

Barbara Kingsolver
Children, Eye, Bereavement
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “Prodigal Summer”, p.63, Faber & Faber

We agreed with him in principal - we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

Barbara Kingsolver
Children, Magic, Littles

Mexico admits you through an arched stone orifice into the tree-filled courtyard of its heart, where a dog pisses against a wall and a waiter hustles through a curtain of jasmine to bring a bowl of tortilla soup, steaming with cilantro and lime. Cats stalk lizards among the clay pots around the fountain, doves settle into the flowering vines and coo their prayers, thankful for the existence of lizards. The potted plants silently exhale, outgrowing their clay pots. Like Mexico's children they stand pinched and patient in last year's too-small shoes.

Barbara Kingsolver
Dog, Prayer, Children

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.

Barbara Kingsolver
Children, Thinking, Dust
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.367, Faber & Faber

The reason most people have kids is because they get pregnant.

Barbara Kingsolver
Children, Kids, People

I look at my four boys, who are the colors of silt, loam, dust, and clay, an infinite palette for children of their own, and I understand that time erases whiteness altogether.

Barbara Kingsolver
Children, Boys, Dust
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.435, Faber & Faber

On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature's jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck?... I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist.

Barbara Kingsolver
Children, Men, Hair
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.436, Faber & Faber

Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.

Barbara Kingsolver
Children, Rain, Mean
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.289, Faber & Faber

When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven

Barbara Kingsolver
Children, Pigs, Heaven
Barbara Kingsolver (2011). “Pigs in Heaven”, p.115, Faber & Faber

Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.

Barbara Kingsolver
Children, Heartache, Work Out

When the scope of the problem seems insuperable, isn't it time to call this one, give it up, and get on with life as we know it. I do know that answer to that one: that's called child abuse. When my teenager worries that her generation won't be able to fix this problem, I have to admit to her that it won't be up to her generation. It's up to mine. This is a now-or-never kind of project.

Barbara Kingsolver
Children, Teenager, Giving

A 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
Mother, Baby, Children
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.320, Faber & Faber

Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.

Barbara Kingsolver
Mother, Children, Phones

I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.

Barbara Kingsolver
Cute, Children, Character
"Barbara Kingsolver: 'Motherhood is so sentimentalised in our culture'". Interview with Gemma Kappala-Ramsamy, www.theguardian.com. May 11, 2013.

God, why does a mortal man have children? It is senseless to love anything this much.

Barbara Kingsolver
Children, Men, Doe
Barbara Kingsolver (2009). “Animal Dreams: A Novel”, p.21, Harper Collins

Be careful what you give children, for sooner or later you are sure to get it back.

Barbara Kingsolver
Children, Giving, Be Careful
Barbara Kingsolver (2011). “High Tide in Tucson”, p.69, Faber & Faber

We aimed for no more than to have dominion over every creature that moved upon the earth. And so it came to pass that we stepped down there on a place we believed unformed, where only darkness moved on the face of the waters. Now you laugh, day and night, while you gnaw on my bones. But what else could we have thought? Only that it began and ended with us. What do we know, even now? Ask the children. Look at what they grew up to be. We can only speak of the things we carried with us, and the things we took away.

Barbara Kingsolver
Children, Night, Water
Barbara Kingsolver (2008). “The Poisonwood Bible”, p.14, Faber & Faber

But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

Barbara Kingsolver
Children, Magic

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