937 Quotes by Barbara Kingsolver

Borders crumble; they won’t hold together on their own; we have to shore them up constantly. They are fortified and patrolled by armed guards, these fences that divide a party of elegant diners on one side from the children on the other whose thin legs curve like wishbones, whose large eyes peer through the barbed wire at so much food—there is no wall high enough to make good in such a neighborhood. For this, of course, is what the fences divide.

In almost thirty years of walking around on the grass of the world, she couldn't recall having spent two minutes alone with a butterfly.

In my first draft every sentence I put down is to advance the story. Each subsequent draft - the 3rd, the 7th, the 27th - is trying to turn each of those sentences into a poem.

If you never stepped on anybody's toes, you never been for a walk.

Well, yeah," Dovey said. "That's America. We watch shows about rich people's houses and their designer dresses and we drool. It's patriotic.

But you don't ask questions of an attic. Museums are their own justification.

On the hill behind her crows flew one by one into the bare trees, arranging their dark blots in the scrim of branches and adding their warnings to the drear sounds of this day. Gone, gone, they rasped. Here was a dead world learning to speak in dissonant, unbearable sounds.

The sun is all you wait for, the light, guardian saint of all the children who lie like death on the wake of the household crime. You stop your heart like a clock: these hours are not your own. You hide your life away, the lucky coin tucked quickly in the shoe from the burglar, when heComes. Because he will, as sure as shoes.

Back then I was still appalled that God would set down his barefoot boy and girl dollies into an Eden where, presumably, He had just turned loose elephantiasis and microbes that eat the human cornea. Now I understand, God is not just rooting for the dollies.