Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
Most popular Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
The past is all we know of the future.
A flower is a plant's way of making love.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.
It's surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.
Sadness is more or less like a head cold—with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he's entitled to joy rather than submission?
The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.
The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.
What school is about; two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
There are days when I am envious of my hens: when I hunger for a purpose as perfect and sure as a single daily egg.
"Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down."
I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.
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 under its roof.
What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.
If you run out of hope at the end of the day, rise in the morning and put it on again with your shoes. Hope is the only reason you won't give in, burn what's left of the ship, and go down with it—the ship of your natural life and your children's only shot.
An imperfectly remembered life is a useless treachery. Every day, more fragments of the past roll around heavily in the chambers of an empty brain, shedding bits of color, a sentence or a fragrance, something that changes and then disappears. It drops like a stone to the bottom of the cave.
The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment's pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence. You can't imagine the effect of this. The talkers are rising above the thinkers.
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.
