Why does a person even get up in the morning? You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die. Life is so stupid I can't stand it.


Barbara Kingsolver

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BARBARA KINGSOLVER
I’ve been thinking about that. About how your kids aren’t really yours, they’re just these peo...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. The most you can do is li...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
You're asking yourself, Can I give this child the best possible upbringing and keep her out of harm'...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we s...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Tortolita, let me tell you a story,” Estevan said. “This is a South American, wild Indian story ...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
It's terrible to lose somebody, but it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and ...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? ...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is th...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earring on ...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but ...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
The longer I think about a food industry organized around an animal that cannot reproduce itself wit...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
If it crosses your mind that water running through hundreds of miles of open ditch in a desert will ...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Most of us are creatures so comforted by habit, it can take something on the order of religion to in...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lor...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains ...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Spring is made of solid, fourteen-karat gratitude, the reward for the long wait. Every religious tra...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they're afraid to plant themselves...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
You think you're no good, so you can't do good things. Jesus, Codi, how long are you going to keep l...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eterni...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cat...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
What keeps you going isn't just some fine destination but the road you're on and the fact you know h...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physi...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhe...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Sometimes I still have American dreams. I mean literally. I see microwave ovens and exercise machine...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyon...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
I don't expect to see perfection before I die. Lord, if I did I would have stuck my head in the oven...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
You're thinking of revolution as a great all-or-nothing. I think of it as one more morning in a mugg...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feel...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do i...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I live...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it's not separate from your life. It grows right up out...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Emelina and I took each other in. All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from recon...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from th...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you ...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. "Sending a girl to college is ...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
....mountains. They stand at every view, like a mother offering a blanket in which to wrap everyday ...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
But I'll tell you a secret. When I want to take God at his word exactly I take a peep out the window...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me, or paused at least to strike a glancing...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine.
Pigs in Heaven
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I kne...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
I don't bring expectations to any of my books. I don't tell people what to do. I want to inv...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Nonfiction requires enormous discipline. You construct the terms of your story, and then you stick t...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
When I sit down to write, I consider myself an artist.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
I know I'm a rare person, a trained scientist who writes fiction, because so few contemporary no...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Most every book I bring into the world is like birthing a baby; it's a lot of effort!
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were mis...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
It's a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to unde...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't hav...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying...
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER