Barbara Kingsolver
Mr. Shepherd, ye cannot stop a bad thought from coming into your head. But ye need not pull up a chair and bide it sit down." - Mrs. BrownCollection: Shepherds
She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on.Collection: Swimming
... Urban friends ask me how I can stand living here, 'so far from everything?' When I hear this question over the phone, I'm usually looking out the window at a forest, a running creek, and a vegetable garden, thinking: Define everything.Collection: Running
Memories do not always soften with time; some grow edges like knives.Collection: Memories
I'm never going to tell the reader what to believe; I'm going to examine these characters that believe different ways, and examine their motives.Collection: Believe
Sugar, it's no parade but you'll get down the street one way or another, so you'd just as well throw your shoulders back and pick up the pace.Collection: Pace
Life proceeds, it enrages. The untouched ones spend their luck without a thought, believing they deserve it.Collection: Believe
Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.Collection: Thinking
I've about decided that's the main thing that separates happy people from the other people: the feeling that you're a practical item, with a use, like a sweater or a socket wrench.Collection: Sweaters
As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop.Collection: Moving
People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.Collection: Book
Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it's going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way.Collection: Real
...whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. And peace will be with you.Collection: Thinking
The most assiduous task of parenting is to divine the difference between boundaries and bondage.Collection: Father
The moth settled onto the curtain and sat still. It was an astonishing creature, with black and white wings patterned in geometric shapes, scarlet underwings, and a fat white body with black spots running down it like a snowman's coal buttons. No human eye had looked at this moth before; no one would see its friends. So much detail goes unnoticed in the world.Collection: Running
Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind.Collection: Wind
The gods you do not pay are the ones that can curse you best.Collection: Pay
Poor Congo, barefoot bride of men who took her jewels and promised the Kingdom.Collection: Men
Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one, "My life; what I stole from history, and how I live with it.Collection: Shoes
How is it right to slip free of an old skin and walk away from the scene of the crime? We came, we saw, we took away and we left behind, we must be allowed our anguish and our regrets.Collection: Regret
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.Collection: Memories
At some point in my life I'd honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I'd quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.Collection: Thinking
Morality is not a large, constructed *thing* you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.Collection: Hands
Wake up now, look alive, for here is a day off work just to praise Creation: the turkey, the squash, and the corn, these things that ate and drank sunshine, grass, mud, and rain, and then in the shortening days laid down their lives for our welfare and onward resolve. There's the miracle for you, the absolute sacrifice that still holds back seed: a germ of promise to do the whole thing again, another time. . . Thanksgiving is Creation's birthday party. Praise harvest, a pause and sigh on the breath of immortality.Collection: Party
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.Collection: Hands
I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension.Collection: Ridiculous
Sometimes I prayed for Baby Jesus to make me good, but Baby Jesus didn't.Collection: Baby
People ask without wanting to know.Collection: People
Over the last decade our country has lost an average of 300 farms a week. Large or small, each of those was the lifes work of a real person or family, people who built their lives around a promise and watched it break.Collection: Country
It's a great freedom to give up on love, and get on with everything else.Collection: Giving Up
Loose lips sink ships.Collection: Ships
Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.Collection: Life
War so conspicuously benefits rich men and kills the poor ones.Collection: War
Bitter words normally evaporate with the moisture of breath, after a quarrel. In order to become permanent, they require transcribers, reporters, complicit black hearts.Collection: Heart
Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don't; but we wear it all the sameCollection: Fortune
The past is all we know of the future.Collection: Past
A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.Collection: Illegal
When the scope of the problem seems insuperable, isn't it time to call this one, give it up, and get on with life as we know it. I do know that answer to that one: that's called child abuse. When my teenager worries that her generation won't be able to fix this problem, I have to admit to her that it won't be up to her generation. It's up to mine. This is a now-or-never kind of project.Collection: Children
If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week. That's not gallons, but barrels. Small changes in buying habits can make big differences. Becoming a less energy-dependent nation may just need to start with a good breakfast.Collection: Country
What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.Collection: Beautiful
Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.Collection: Christian
That's how it is: some people are content to wait till you ask, while others jump right in with the whole story.Collection: People
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.Collection: Funny
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.Collection: Zero
My way of finding a place in this world is to write one.Collection: Writing
Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature.Collection: D Day
A sound-bite culture can't discuss science very well. Exactly what we're losing when we reduce biodiversity, the causes and consequences of global warming-these traumas can't be adequately summarized in an evening news wrap-up.Collection: Evening
Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.Collection: Animal
Something in me was always watching life from the outside, permanently obsessed with the notion of belonging vs. not-belonging [to a group]. It did not make for a happy childhood, but it was excellent training for a writer.Collection: Childhood