Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

born 1955 United States

Barbara Kingsolver (born April 8, 1955) is an American fiction writer. She has written several novels and poems, and established the Bellwether Prize for "literature of social change".

United States
20th-century poets
Essayists
Novelists
Politicians

Also known as: Kingsolver, Barbara

Random Barbara Kingsolver quote

15 quotes

Every minute with a child takes seven minutes off your life.

Animal Dreams (1990)

A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.

The Poisonwood Bible (1998)

I also thank Bill McKibben and his 350.org colleagues for the most important work in the world, and the most unending.

Flight Behavior (2012)

The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.

Animal Dreams (1990)

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.

Animal Dreams (1990)

Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn't rip off.

Animal Dreams (1990)

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't.

Animal Dreams (1990)

A flock is nothing but the put-together of all your past choices.

Flight Behavior (2012)

We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

Animal Dreams (1990)

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.

Animal Dreams (1990)

A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. and, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. this forest eats itself and lives forever.

Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.

Prodigal Summer (2000)

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.

Animal Dreams (1990)

Cub retreated to the familiar grounds of remorse and insufficiency, the terms of his existence, ratified by marriage. He could construct defeat from any available material and live inside it, but for once Dellarobia didn't go there with him. she was going ahead.

Flight Behavior (2012)

To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another, - that is surely the base instinct. Baser than even hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty. If the whole world of the living has no turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Barbara Kingsolver (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.