Home > Author > Barbara Kingsolver
101 " To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. "
― Barbara Kingsolver , The Poisonwood Bible
102 " 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? "
― Barbara Kingsolver
103 " Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel. "
104 " 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. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she's gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She's the one you can't put down. "
105 " Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,' he said. 'We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages. "
― Barbara Kingsolver , Flight Behavior
106 " The giant beech next door intends to shiver off every hair of its pelt. "
― Barbara Kingsolver , The Lacuna
107 " Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. "
― Barbara Kingsolver , Prodigal Summer
108 " Move on. Walk forward into the light. "
109 " Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man's skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people's back yards. "
110 " They said it was to be a revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants’ rooms because they didn’t believe in laundry maids or cooks.Nobody does, really. Why should they? Only in having clean clothes, clean floors, and enchiladas tapatias. "
111 " Like many human beings, he took the least sign of conversation as his cue to make noise. "
112 " 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. "
113 " You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own. "
114 " But if we can't summon the empathy to imagine what our dead would have asked of us, or the selflessness to give it, then we must accept the desperately sad verdict that each generation's hopes will die with it, and no cumulative progress is possible for the human will. "
― Barbara Kingsolver , Small Wonder
115 " For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers with heavy heads. You can shield them with your body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but they'll still move toward him. Without cease they'll bend to his light. "
116 " She has changed in this way that motherhood changes you, so that you forget you ever had time for small things like despising the color pink. "
― Barbara Kingsolver , Pigs in Heaven
117 " But I'll tell you a secret. When I want to take God at his word exactly I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers. "
118 " Some of life's greatest calls were answered not by the head but by the body. "
119 " This will be Great Mam's last spring. Her last June apples. Her last fresh roasting ears from the garden. "
― Barbara Kingsolver , Homeland and Other Stories
120 " Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa. "