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

As a dinner guest I gratefully eat just about anything that's set before me, because graciousness among friends is dearer to me than any other agenda.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

02Undated

Eating is a genuine need, continuous from our first day to our last, amounting over time to our most significant statement of what we are made of and what we have chosen to make of our connection to home ground.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

03Undated

It lasted just a moment, whatever that is. One held breath? An ant's afternoon? It was brief, I can promise that much, for although it's been many years now since my children ruled my life, a mother recalls the measure of the silences.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

04Undated

Mistakes wreck your life. But they make what you have. It's kind of all one. You know what Hester told me when we were working the sheep one time? She said it's no good to complain about your flock, because it's the put-together of all your past choices.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

05Undated

Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

06Undated

Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

07Undated

I asked Elsie how much food they needed from outside the community. 'Flour and sugar,' she said, and then thought a bit. 'Sometimes we'll buy pretzels as a spl

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

08Undated

When something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

09Undated

He lifts her breasts, which fit perfectly into his hands, though he knows this is no promise that he gets to keep them. A million things you can't have will fit in a human hand.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

10Undated

In Bobby Ogle's version of heaven everyone would wind up in one place, criminals and Muslims included.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

11Undated

She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

12Undated

To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

13Undated

Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining?

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

14Undated

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.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

15Undated

But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after - oh, that's love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she's gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She's the one you can't put down.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

16Undated

Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,' he said. 'We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

17Undated

That is surely childhood's end, when you look at a thing like a rabbit needing skinned and have to say: "Nobody else is going to do this.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

18Undated

You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It's what these guys have decided to call America. They have the audacity to say, 'There, you sons of bitches, don't lay a finger on it. That is a finished product.'""But any country is still in the making. Always. That's just history, people have to see that.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

19Undated

The giant beech next door intends to shiver off every hair of its pelt.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

20Undated

Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

21Undated

Move on. Walk forward into the light.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

22Undated

Forgive me, O Heavenly Father, according to the multitude of Thy mercies. I have lusted in my heart to break a man's skull and scatter the stench of his brains across several people's back yards.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

23Undated

They said it was to be a revolutionary house, free of class struggle, no servants’ rooms because they didn’t believe in laundry maids or cooks.Nobody does, really. Why should they? Only in having clean clothes, clean floors, and enchiladas tapatias.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote

24Undated

...animals behaved with purpose, it seemed. Unlike people.

Barbara Kingsolver / quote