Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job... And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another – that is surely the basic instinct... Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.

— Barbara Kingsolver

Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

No matter what affronts of youthful insolence he had to face in his day, he’d still have that: he was a man taken care of by a woman.

— Barbara Kingsolver

Children – even when they have endured the unthinkable – have a gift for divining the moment when the grown-ups really need to lighten up.

— Barbara Kingsolver

In my first draft every sentence I put down is to advance the story. Each subsequent draft – the 3rd, the 7th, the 27th – is trying to turn each of those sentences into a poem.

— Barbara Kingsolver

In our darkest hours we may find comfort in the age-old slogan from the resistance movement, declaring that we shall not be moved. But we need to finish that sentence. Moved from where? Are we anchoring to the best of what we’ve believed in, throughout our history, or merely to an angry new mode of self-preservation? The American moral high ground can’t possibly be an isolated mountaintop from which we refuse to learn anything at all to protect ourselves from monstrous losses.

— Barbara Kingsolver

The pale-skinned boy stood shivering in water up to his waist, thinking these were the most awful words in any language: You will be surprised. The moment when everything is about to change.

— Barbara Kingsolver

To have been made the creatures we are is a marvel. If the process required millennia rather than seven days, how can it be any less sublime?

— Barbara Kingsolver

I am looking for the door to another world. I’ve waited thousands of years. Take me.

— Barbara Kingsolver

No rational guidelines existed for comparing youthful freedom with the heart-enlarging earthquake of family life.

— Barbara Kingsolver

We’re chalk and cheese. Somebody ought to do a study on us, if they want to know how kids in the same family can turn out totally different.

— Barbara Kingsolver

It ran deeper than that. I’d lost what there was to lose: first my mother and then my baby. Nothing you love will stay. Hallie could call that attitude a crutch, but she didn’t know, she hadn’t loved and lost so deeply. As Loyd said, she’d never been born – not into life as I knew it. Hallie could still risk everything.

— Barbara Kingsolver

Of course the scientist’s position is subordinate. Our task is to make our fussy natures invisible against the mechanisms of the universe. Truth is not ours to find within, but to search out. We study the known world in order to recognize the remarkable.

— Barbara Kingsolver

But from here on in I’m your Ma, and that means I love you the most. Forever.

— Barbara Kingsolver

Autumn darkness had already blinded the dining room windows, an effect that dispirited him, no matter how many autumns he lived or how predictably the light receded.

— Barbara Kingsolver

Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot.

— Barbara Kingsolver

Eaters must understand,” Wendell Berry writes, “that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.

— Barbara Kingsolver

After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends. – WALLACE STEVENS, “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard.

— Barbara Kingsolver

No, you shouldn’t. But you are here, so yes, you should be here. There are more words in the world than no and yes.

— Barbara Kingsolver

She wondered if humiliation ever ran its natural course and peeled off, like a sunburn, or just kept blazing.

— Barbara Kingsolver

And I have no idea how to be kind to myself. Living, as a general enterprise, seems unkind beyond belief.

— Barbara Kingsolver

Overweight children are a demographic in many ways similar to minors addicted to cigarettes, with one notable exception: their parents are usually their suppliers.

— Barbara Kingsolver
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