Barbara Kingsolver quotes

The very least you can do in your life is 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.
- Barbara Kingsolver

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.
- Barbara Kingsolver

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

She kept swimming out into life because she hadn't yet found a rock to stand on.
- Barbara Kingsolver

Everything you're sure is right can be wrong in another place.
- Barbara Kingsolver

But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run.
- Barbara Kingsolver

God doesn’t need to punish us. He just grants us a long enough life to punish ourselves.
- Barbara Kingsolver

Listen. To live is to be marked. To live is to change, to acquire the words of a story, and that is the only celebration we mortals really know. In perfect stillness, frankly, I've only found sorrow.
- Barbara Kingsolver

I’ve seen how you can’t learn anything when you’re trying to look like the smartest person in the room.
- Barbara Kingsolver

What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness.
- Barbara Kingsolver

The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.
- Barbara Kingsolver

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

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.
- Barbara Kingsolver

The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.
- Barbara Kingsolver

There is a strange moment in time, after something horrible happens, when you know it's true, but you haven't told anyone yet.
- Barbara Kingsolver

A mother's body remembers her babies-the folds of soft flesh, the softly furred scalp against her nose. Each child has it's own entreaties to body and soul.
- Barbara Kingsolver

In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.
- Barbara Kingsolver

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

It's what you do that makes your soul.
- Barbara Kingsolver

Pain reaches the heart with electrical speed, but truth moves to the heart as slowly as a glacier.
- Barbara Kingsolver

Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.
- Barbara Kingsolver

The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.
- Barbara Kingsolver

It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.
- Barbara Kingsolver

If we can't, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread.
- Barbara Kingsolver

Sometimes the strength of motherhood is greater than natural laws.
- Barbara Kingsolver