"Perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Barbara Kingsolver quotes (page 21 of 23)
451 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It's the same struggle for each of us, and the same path out: the utterly simple, infinitely wise, ultimately defiant act of loving one thing and then another, loving our way back to life."
Read quote
3 likes
"Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise."
Read quote
3 likes
"Mom is losing, no doubt, because our vegetables have come to lack two features of interest: nutrition and flavor. Storage and transport take predictable tolls on the volatile plant compounds that subtly add up to taste and food value. Breeding to increase shelf life also has tended to decrease palatability. Bizarre as it seems, we've accepted a tradeoff that amounts to: "Give me every vegetable in every season, even if it tastes like a cardboard picture of its former self.""
Read quote
3 likes
"That's how it is: some people are content to wait till you ask, while others jump right in with the whole story."
Read quote
3 likes
"He had senile dementia and liked to go outside naked, but he could still do two things perfectly: win at checkers and write out prescriptions."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"My way of finding a place in this world is to write one."
Read quote
3 likes
"But children robbed of love will dwell on magic."
Read quote
3 likes
"There must be limits, somewhere, to the human footprint on this earth. When the whole of the world is reduced to nothing but human product, we will have lost the map that can show us how we got here, and can offer our spirits an answer when we ask why. Surely we are capable of declaring sacred some quarters that we dare not enter or possess."
Read quote
3 likes
"The last generation's worst fears became the next one's B-grade entertainment."
Read quote
3 likes
"A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars."
Read quote
3 likes
"my own relationships with the animals in my life are absurdly complex: Some I love, some I eat, and the scraps left over from the ones I eat, I feed to the ones I love."
Read quote
3 likes
"There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin."
Read quote
3 likes
"Sometimes I still have American dreams. I mean literally. I see microwave ovens and exercise machines and grocery store shelves with 30 brands of shampoo, and I look at these things oddly, in my dream. I stand and think, "What is all this for? What is the hunger that drives this need?" I think it's fear. Codi, I hope you won't be hurt by this, but I don't think I'll ever be going back. I don't think I can."
Read quote
3 likes
"I wonder that religion can live or die on the strength of a faint, stirring breeze. The scent trail shifts, causing the predator to miss the pounce. One god draws in the breath of life and rises; another god expires."
Read quote
3 likes
"I know how people are, with their habits of mind. Most will sail through from cradle to grave with a conscience clean as snow...I know people. Most have no earthly notion of the price of a snow-white conscience."
Read quote
3 likes
"Once the rains abated, my father's garden thrived in the heat like an unleashed temper."
Read quote
3 likes
"Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least."
Read quote
3 likes
"The arrogance of the able-bodied is staggering. Yes, maybe we'd like to be able to get places quickly, and carry things in both hands but only because we have to keep up with the rest of you ... We would rather be just like us, and have that be all right."
Read quote
3 likes