937 Quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

Once the rains abated, my father’s garden thrived in the heat like an unleashed temper.

You learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist history rather than a spectator” Father Fernando Cardenal.

The important thing isn’t the house. It’s the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go.

You force people to stop asking questions, and before you know it they have auctioned off the question mark, or sold it for scrap. No boldness. No good ideas for fixing what’s broken in the land. Because if you happen to mention it’s broken, you are automatically disqualified.

I never put real people into my fiction – I can’t see the slightest point of that, when I have the alternative of inventing utterly subservient slave-people, whose every detail of appearance and behavior I can bend to serve my theme and plot.

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work – that goes on, and it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children’s bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don’t get lost.

To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another that is surely the basic instinct - crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is!

The important thing isn't the house. It's the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go... It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other. And living on the border between Mexico and the U.S. for so many years gave me a lot of insight into that.