BKBarbara Kingsolver

172 collected words

Barbara Kingsolver

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

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.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

02Undated

The substance of grief is not imaginary. It's as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

03Undated

Sometimes I've survived anger only one minute at a time, by saying to myself again and again that the best kind of revenge is some kind of life beyond this, some kind of goodness. And I can lay no claim to goodness until I can prove that mean people have not made me mean.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

04Undated

The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earring on sad, rich widows

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

05Undated

Now, see, that's why everybody wants Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy.' Dovey's phone buzzed, and she laughed, ignoring it. 'The trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn't agree with you, all that's left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

06Undated

I almost never respect men. They're like flowers -- all show, a lot of color and lust. You pick them and throw them on the ground.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

07Undated

This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

08Undated

We are bodies, sometimes with dreams and always with desires.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

09Undated

...The question is, why do you think you can't be a writer?""To be a writer, you need readers.""I'm no painter, then. Who ever looks at my little dumb pieces of shit?

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

10Undated

I do understand that they fall when I'm least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

11Undated

She never says gracias because life is made of survival not grace, she says, and servants are paid to bring what they're asked.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

12Undated

Even feigning surprise, pretending it was unexpected and saying a ritual thanks, is surely wiser than just expecting everything so carelessly.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

13Undated

Pay attention to your dreams; when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

14Undated

Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don't tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute appreciation. It's fairly sexy. Of course I don't know how these men behave at home, if they help with the cooking or are vain and boorish and mistreat their wives. I realized Mediterranean cultures have their issues. Fine, don't burst my bubble. I didn’t want to marry these guys, I just wanted to watch. (p. 247)

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

15Undated

Why does a person spend money on a stamp to spout bile at a stranger?

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

16Undated

...I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass. I crave to be rid of them...

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

17Undated

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

18Undated

It’s a funny thing to complain about, but most of America is perfectly devoid of smells. I must have noticed it before, but this last time back I felt it as an impairment. For weeks after we arrived I kept rubbing my eyes, thinking I was losing my sight or maybe my hearing. But it was the sense of smell that was gone. Even in the grocery store, surrounded in one aisle by more kinds of food than will ever be known in a Congolese lifetime, there was nothing on the air but a vague, disinfected emptiness. I mentioned this to Anatole, who’d long since taken note of it, of course. “The air is just blank in America,” I said. “You can’t ever smell what’s around you, unless you stick your nose right down into something."“Maybe that is why they don’t know about Mobutu,” he suggested.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

19Undated

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.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

20Undated

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

21Undated

Parenting is something that happens mostly while you’re thinking of something else.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

22Undated

This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

23Undated

Our holiday food splurge was a small crate of tangerines, which we found ridiculously thrilling after an eight-month abstinence from citrus.... Lily hugged each one to her chest before undressing it as gently as a doll. Watching her do that as she sat cross-legged on the floor one morning in pink pajamas, with bliss lighting her cheeks, I thought: Lucky is the world, to receive this grateful child. Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

24Undated

The longer I think about a food industry organized around an animal that cannot reproduce itself without technical assistance, the more I mistrust it. Poultry, a significant part of the modern diet, is emblematic of the whole dirty deal. Having no self-sustaining bloodlines to back up the industry is like having no gold standard to underpin paper currency. Maintaining a natural breeding poultry flock is a rebellion, at the most basic level, against the wholly artificial nature of how foods are produced.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote