Barbara Kingsolver
The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.Collection: Impossible
He warned Mother not to flout God's Will by expecting too much of us. "Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes,' he still loves to say, as often as possible. 'It's hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Love
A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.Collection: Rain
Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.Collection: Wise
The death of something living is the price of our own survival, and we pay it again and again. We have no choice. It is the one solemn promise every life on earth is born and bound to keep.Collection: Choices
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."Collection: Mom
restraint equals indulgenceCollection: Restraint
But still, I’d be darned if I was going to be one of those Americans who stomp around Italy barking commands in ever-louder English. I was going to be one of those Americans who traversed Italy with my forehead knit in concentration, divining wordsw from their Latin roots and answering by wedging French cognates into Italian pronunciations spliced onto a standard Spanish verb conjugation.Collection: Latin
Tomorrow these villagers would carry their secret icons into the church without any priest and light the candles themselves, moving together in single-minded grace. Like the school of the fish, so driven to righteousness they could flout the law, declare the safety of their souls, then go home and destroy the evidence.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Destination
There’s always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.Collection: Stories
I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.Collection: Reading
That’s how it is: some people are content to wait till you ask, while others jump right in with the whole story.Collection: Stories