937 Quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

If chained is where you have been, your ams will always bear marks of the shackles. What you have to lose is your story, your own slant. You’ll look at the scars on your arms and see mere ugliness, or you’ll take great care to look away from them and see nothing. Either way, you have no words for the story of where you came from.

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.

Even the vendors sitting on stools around the periphery work steadily at connection, nodding at potential buyers, like a sewing machine prodding its needle into the cloth.

Where you’d be wearing out the knees of your trousers, sir, they just have to go ahead and wear out their knees!

The last generation’s worst fears became the next one’s B-grade entertainment.

Scientists are not like other people, sir. We cannot slam our portals. We have to follow evidence where it leads, even if no one likes that place. Even if it suggests that all we have ever believed might be mistaken.

Plus,” Tig said, “it reminds me to be patient. Seeing all these people that have passed on. I get frustrated sometimes, waiting.” “For people to die?” “Yeah. To be honest. The guys in charge of everything right now are so old. They really are, Mom. Older than you. They figured out the meaning of life in, I guess, the nineteen fifties and sixties. When it looked like there would always be plenty of everything.

It’s also interesting how it’s hard to be depressed around a three-year-old, if you’re paying attention. After a while, whatever you’re mooning about begins to seem like some elaborate adult invention.

I wish I could go visit them and talk in my own language, the English I knew before I grew thorns on my tongue.