Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life.

Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can't even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain.

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

Finally, cooking is good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood.

Maybe life doesn't get any better than this, or any worse, and what we get is just what we're willing to find: small wonders, where they grow.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

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 live right in it, under its roof.

It's what you do that makes your soul.

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.

I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.

Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of the dirt.

It's terrible to lose somebody, but it's also true that some people never have anybody to lose, and I think that's got to be so much worse.

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.

You don't think you'll live past it and you don't really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that's still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.

From the fallen tree everybody makes firewood.

Terms like that, 'Humane Society,' are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.

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

No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.

What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive.

Friends, there is nothing like your own family to make you appreciate strangers!

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.

Honk if you love Jesus, text while driving if you want to meet up.

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.

Root out all the "to be" verbs in your prose and bludgeon them until dead. No "It was" or "they are" or "I am." Don't let it be, make it happen.

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.

Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.

A writer's occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.

Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.

A flower is a plant's way of making love.

The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.

I know I have to write about the things that keep me awake at night.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

...nothing momentous comes in this world unless it comes on the shoulders of kindness.

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

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.

Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.

I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe; I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.

You can’t replace people you love with other people…But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.