Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,' he said. 'We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.

— Barbara Kingsolver

I almost never respect men. They're like flowers -- all show, a lot of color and lust. You pick them and throw them on the ground.

— Barbara Kingsolver

I asked Elsie how much food they needed from outside the community. 'Flour and sugar,' she said, and then thought a bit. 'Sometimes we'll buy pretzels as a SPL

— 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

I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who'd just as soon dangle us all from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which... is at home at the moment.

— Barbara Kingsolver

I do understand that they fall when I'm the least able to pay attention because poems fall not from a tree, really, but from the richly pollinated boughs of an ordinary life, buzzing, as lives do, with clamor and glory. They are easy to miss but everywhere: poetry just is, whether we revere it or try to put it in prison. It is elementary grace, communicated from one soul to another.

— Barbara Kingsolver

If chained is where you have been, you rams 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.

— Barbara Kingsolver

If the Lord hasn't got a boyfriend lined up for me to marry, that's his business.

— Barbara Kingsolver

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

— Barbara Kingsolver

I know what it is: it's a green mamba snake away up in the tree. You don't have to be afraid of them anymore because you are one. They lie so still on the tree branch; they are the same everything as the tree. You could be right next to one and not even know. It's so quiet there. That's just exactly what I want to go and be, when I have to disappear. Your eyes will be little and round, but you are so far up there you can look down and see the whole world, Mama and everybody. The tribes of Ham, She, and Safety all together. Finally, you are the highest one of all.

— Barbara Kingsolver