Quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

He warned Mother not to flout Gods 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. Its hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.

Time cures you first, and then it kills you.

A territory is only possessed for a moment in time.

If the Lord hasnt got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, thats his business.

Science doesnt tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.

For scientists, reality is not optional.

I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book.

People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know its true, but you havent told anyone yet.

The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away.

People ask without wanting to know.

Your blood for mine. If not these, then those. War is the supreme mathematics problem. It strains our skulls, yet we work out the sums, believing we have pressed the most monstrous quantities into a balanced equation.

The room looks as if a giant dog after a large lunch of food, socks, paints, trousers and pencils, walked into that room and vomited everywhere.

Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether youre a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.

Until that moment Id thought I could have it both ways; to be one of them, and also my husbands wife. What conceit! I was his instrument, his animal. Nothing more. How we wives and mothers do perish at the hands of our own righteousness. I was just one more of those women who clamp their mouths shut and wave the flag as their nation rolls off to conquer another in war. Guilty or innocent, they have everything to lose. They are what there is to lose. A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.

The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.

Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.

If we cant, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most wont even stand close to the blade. Im one of those. We dont bend anything.