What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.

— Barbara Kingsolver

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 won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

— Barbara Kingsolver

What you lose in blindness is the surrounding space, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

— Barbara Kingsolver

When something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

— Barbara Kingsolver

...when the public nerve is aroused, the most impressive capacity of man is his skill for lying.

— Barbara Kingsolver

When you're given a brilliant child you polish her and let her shine. Pigs in Heaven

— Barbara Kingsolver

While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow. Ruth May shrank back through the narrow passage between this brief fabric of light and all the rest of what there is for us: the long waiting. Now she will wait the rest of the time. It will be exactly as long as the time that passed before she was born.

— Barbara Kingsolver

Why does a person spend money on a stamp to spout bile at a stranger?

— Barbara Kingsolver

Why must some of us deliberate between brands of toothpaste while others deliberate between damp dirt and bone dust to quiet the fire of an empty stomach lining?

— Barbara Kingsolver

You always need that spark of imagination. Sometimes I'm midway through a book before it happens. However, I don't wait for the muse to descend, I sit down every day and I work when I'm not delivering lambs on the farm.

— Barbara Kingsolver